Fantastic Four 2099UGR miniseries
by Wyzeguy
Summary: The four issue miniseries from the 2099 UnderGround Revised fanfic group. The Fantastic Four awaken in the year 2099 ... but are they the real Four?
1. Shifting Gears

_**From Reed Richards' private journal, 20th Century** _

For all the technological marvels I've seen and studied, one relatively simple device stands out in my mind: a bicycle. I was seven when my father gave it to me for my birthday. Anyone else at that age would have been eager to ride it on the first day, and I admit, part of me was. But Nathaniel Richards -- who was always on the lookout for a new science lesson -- wanted me to study the machine first, so I could understand the framework, the gears, the chains, the brakes, and how it all worked together. He was fond of saying, "the question is not 'if' everything in our universe is connected -- the question is 'how'." I took that to heart, and I spent eight days, every spare moment I had, examining every last part and detail of that bicycle. Only then did I ride it.

I believe I amused my parents, because my father later told me he'd only expected me to spend one day at the most on the inspection project. He told me he was happy nonetheless, because it meant I was eager to take to heart what he was teaching me about science.

Ever since then, I have been exploring the universe (universes, plural, if I may be honest) with the same perfectionist eye with which I studied my first bicycle. This hasn't always produced the most favorable results, but one way or another, the wheels and gears have never stopped turning.

* * *

**Fantastic Four 2099 UnderGround Revised**

**Issue One, Volume One**

**"Shifting Gears"**

**Written by David Ellis**

**Edited by Michael C. Shirley**

* * *

**The Negative Zone, The Year 2099**

"Don't like the look of that Zonescape," Keith McLaughlin uttered, trying and failing to keep the nervous squeak out of his voice as he stared up across the expansive black sky. Black as space. Black as death.

That sky -- called the Zonescape -- never looked quite the same way two Earth-days in a row. The expanse was capable of displaying itself in all sorts of demented colors and patterns, each one more chaotic than the last. Keith was never the most descriptive of people, but it looked to him as if the sky were the canvas on which a troubled Impressionist painter tried desperately to communicate his nervous breakdown.

Today, it looked to be cut and bleeding with jagged red streaks of energy. Planets and planetoids were scattered far and wide across the expanse, each one in an erratic orbit as if they were ready to flee at the first sign of danger.

"Oh, here we go," one of Keith's co-workers muttered over their helmets' communications link. The voice belonged to Dennis Kong, which made Keith grit his teeth in anger. "Paranoid Keith doesn't like it. So we'll all pack up and go home..."

"We don't wanna hear it, Keith," Shandra Willis spoke over the same link. At least he could halfway tolerate her. Mostly because she didn't call him 'Paranoid' -- a nickname he hated.

Keith shook his head, wishing he weren't in the bulky yellow labor mechsuit so he could wipe the sweat off his brow. He loathed the suit because it robbed him of any and all agility; in this environment, there was always something to run from. "I'm serious, you guys -- I smell Voltstorm." The sky had all the charged indications of an electrical storm ... and a bad one. "I tell you--"

But he didn't know why he bothered to tell them anything. Predictably, his teammates filled the commlink with their wisecracks: "You're in a suit, Keith," Kong explained. "You don't smell anything except yourself--"

Before Kong had even finished his sentence, another teammate, Wade Tyson, fired off, "that's that prawn curry working that you're smelling, man..."

Keith gritted his teeth, hating "Landshark Wade" almost as much as Kong. Porn-vidding son of a...

"Bite rats, you guys," Keith finally retorted, unable to come up with anything more creative.

All he heard on the line is their victorious laughter; if there was anything they were actually good at (and Thor forbid it should be the work they were paid to do), it was picking on him, the new guy to the operation.

Above them, above the mining planetoid on which they stood, the sky coalesced into a hurricane pattern, swirling energy in orange and light-blue hues. Whenever that happened, Keith and the others knew that the local climate has gone from Chaotic to Completely Shocking Insane.

Shandra was the first to find her voice amid the forming lightshow. "Uhm, people ... Keith might've had a point this time." Keith didn't know whether to be ecstatic that she'd backed him up, or insulted that she'd phrased it that way, but now wasn't the time to debate it.

"Stormsign," Kong confirmed breathlessly.

"We got Stormsign," Wade shouted, and Keith was inwardly amused that the man was trying to keep the nervous squeak out of _his_ voice for a change. "Notify Homegate that we'll be heading back."

"I told you guys," Keith reminded them with a small amount of triumph, as he hustled to the base as fast as his heavy hydraulic suit could manage. "I warned y--"

But the crimson flash of Zone lightning lanced through his suit and interrupted his train of thought. He couldn't even feel himself slump to the cold craggy terrain, but he was aware of it. All he had the brain capacity to do was wonder why he wasn't dead.

* * *

Dying didn't seem like a fun activity, so the rest of the workers kicked in their suits' rear thrusters to close the distance between themselves and the mining station. The main bay doors opened to admit them, then closed far too slowly for anyone's tastes. 

"Gatefinders Activated," an automated female voice informed them with the kind of forced-sunny disposition one usually heard from a long-distance vidcom telemarketer. The kind of voice they all hated.

More lightning struck around the station, and one stream of red energy attacked the installation's tower. Sparks flew from every piece of electronic equipment in the station, which was by no means a good sign. Especially when one of those pieces of equipment happened to be a dimensional jumpgate back to Earth.

Kong swore under his breath, then spoke into the comm system, hoping it would work. "Stark/Fujikawa Homegate, this is Maintenance Flight Nine coming in..." The microphone just sparked a few times in response, then died. "Terrific."

"The link's down?" Shandra asked, already knowing the answer.

Kong turned to face her. "The whole shockin' works is fried! The comms, the Gate, you name it!"

"So we're stuck here," Wade muttered in near-defeat.

"No kidding. Wade, check the life support and see what condition it's in. If we _are_ stuck here, that thing needs to be in working order. Willis, help him make any necessary repairs to it. Let's get moving people; it's the only way we're gonna stay al-- Willis, are you listening to me?"

Shandra's gaze was fixed on the monitors. "Huh? Oh, uh, sir? Looks like the surveillance is still up. Might wanna look at this. I can't tell if the storm's blitzing the readings, or..."

Kong shoved her aside to see the monitors' activity for himself. "What're you...?"

"There's one life sign just outside, looks critical," Shandra explained. "That should be Keith."

"Couldn't've happened to a more annoying little--"

"But look at what it's showing out three hundred kiloms out, in the Quadrant A-9 crater."

Wade's eyes peered at a strange metallic object at the appointed location. Inside of it, energy signatures were visible on a few wavelengths. "Lifesigns," he identified. By now, all three of them were huddled around the same monitor bank, shouldering for room.

"Yeah, four of 'em. Zone lightning's seeping through the metal hull like tissue paper."

Kong couldn't believe what he's seeing. "Where the hell'd _they_ come from?"

She shrugged. "Dunno. Should we get 'em? The storm's gettin' pretty bad out there."

Kong didn't even have to think about it. "What do we look like? Search and rescue? If they're still alive after being pummeled by Zone lightning, let's wait out the storm and pick 'em up by transport."

"So we leave them out there in the worst barrage we've seen to date."

"I'm not gonna get into this with you, Willis!" Kong declared with a deadly-serious stare. "Just worry about your job; we'll deal with the glow-worms later."

"Okay, what about Keith?"

The heavy-set, thirty something Asian man shot her a tired glare. "Same deal applies. He still has a pulse when we get to him, he gets a ride back. He doesn't? Who the shock cares." He turned his back to end the conversation.

Shaking her head, Shandra assisted Wade on the repair detail, thankful the storm's calamitous racket drowned out what she was muttering under her breath.

The storm faded out with a whisper five minutes before any of the workers realized it was gone. By then, they were neck-deep in power tools and diagnostics. The rattling of the base's outer shielding against the barrage had become rhythmic, to the point that Kong and the others had grown accustomed to it in the long, tedious hours. The first to notice the change in weather was Wade, who had stood up to raid the snack rations before realizing it had become quiet.

This meant they were all going to live another day, and that they had pickup duty. Even when a check of the scanners revealed that Paranoid Keith and the mysterious four people were still alive, if barely. Shandra was the only one with any kind of motivation for a rescue mission.

Now, after firing up the heavy transport -- a belching metal monstrosity that looked like it had been rejected from the Star Wars franchise for obvious reasons of homeliness -- the crew members set their sights on one of the larger craters on a planetoid pockmarked with them. The vehicle's proper name was the Heracles Mark IV, but they just called it "The Transport" because it was the only one available to them. The rest of the crew's transportation involved either the rocket thrusters attached to the backs of their labor suits, or archaic flybikes that had long before become obsolete on Earth.

The four strange humanoids were nestled in a rather large oval container that was big enough to make the transport's use a necessity. The Negative Zone's haphazard laws of physics made the transport's magnetic grapplers practically useless, but Stark/Fujikawa scientists had put their heads together and engineered a tractor-beam system that worked well in this dimension. The good news was, Kong and his crew had little trouble locking onto the containment pod with the tractor beam and raising it from the depths of the crater. The bad news was that steering the transport back to base with the pod's added weight proved be a harder chore than they'd anticipated.

With a fair amount of patience, swearing, and bad jokes, they were on their way back to the mining installation (Kong even stopped to pick up Keith's near-lifeless body without being told). One of the various jokes and exchanges involved Shandra idly asking what a bizarrely-shaped pod full of humans was doing out this far into the boonies. "What, has Metex decided to ship packages out here to the Zone, now?"

Kong shrugged slightly in the pilot's seat while keeping his eyes on the terrain ahead. "Depends... know anybody shopping for live humans over the 'Net?"

Landshark Wade didn't miss a beat. "Hey, what Paranoid Keith does in his free time is his own business." The two men laughed heartily at that, but Shandra couldn't bring herself to manage more than a strangled chuckle.

* * *

"How's McLaughlin?" Kong asked as Shandra reentered the vehicle hangar from her trip to the infirmary. 

"Stable," she replied carefully. "Which just means he's near death and likely to stay that way for quite some time."

"Why don't we just pull the plug on him?" Wade inquired while working on the locking mechanism on the four mystery figures' housing chamber. "The guy was a waste of resources when he was upright, and he's a waste of life support now that he's a vegetable."

"He's not on life support," Shandra pointed out, glaring at the back of Wade's head, "and he's not a vegetable. He's hovering on the brink of a coma, and he still has brain activity. If anything, he's just asleep, and the equipment is monitoring him, not sustaining him."

Wade turned to look her in the eye. "Why do you even care so much whether he lives or dies. What, were you two havin' a little--"

"That's enough, you two," Kong ordered, as he walked toward the container. "Let's just get this ... thing opened."

"Fine, Kong," Wade acquiesced with a shrug, turning to his friend and foreman. "Got a crowbar? A spare laser cutter? The lock's keypad-coded; I'm surprised the voltstorm didn't fry it."

Shandra had to chuckle. "Seems to me we have nothing but time to work out the combination. They're not going anywhere; neither are we."

The next voice they heard was neither theirs, nor even human. "Favorable exterior temperature/climate established," a computerized voice declared, one so badly distorted that the workers couldn't even tell whether it was supposed to be a male or female voice. This directed their attention to the mystery chamber, from which the voice originated. "Opening stasis unit."

Dry ice vapor hissed from the seams in the unit, and the workers stepped back a bit as the top opened like a coffin lid. It looked like nothing so much as an open-casket birth to a quartet of adult humans, each of them different from the rest. There were three males and one female; one was a brown-haired man with a medium build and slightly graying temples. Another male had a more athletic build and blond hair. The third man was as heavily-built as Kong, with red hair and a hairline that was just starting to recede. The woman was slim and blonde, with hair longer than shoulder-length.

All four were still asleep, and all four were clothed in dark-blue bodysuits bearing a black numeral "4" on a circle of white.

This was curious, because the costuming seemed very familiar to the workers. Almost like...

"The Fantastic Four?" Shandra guessed, stepping cautiously closer to the strangers. "Am I seeing this right?" She looked up at her co-workers, but they only gave her blank looks. "Twencen heroes...?" she tried again, fishing for some kind of reaction. "Led by Reed Richards...?"

Kong looked surprised. "Wait ... the guy who discovered this place?" He gestured to his surroundings, meaning the Negative Zone at large, rather than their base station.

"Richards was some kinda hero?" Wade asked. "Like a ... what's the word, 'superhero'? Don't remember that being mentioned in job orientation. And why would some people launch themselves into the Negative Zone just to dress up like dead twencen celebrities? Is that a new fad or somethin'?"

Shandra rolled her eyes and glanced between Kong and Wade. "You two are hopeless. What if it _is_ them? I mean, is that possible?"

Wade studied the '4' insignias, then looked upas if something had clicked in his memory. "'Fantastic' ...oh yeah, is that the team with the rock guy and the fire guy? Think I saw a vid on that once. Looked really low-budget." Glancing again at their guests' faces, he frowned. "But there are no rock or fire guys here, so this _can't_ be them."

Looking back at the newcomers, Shandra realized they were waking up. "Well, why don't we ask them who they are?"

* * *

The containment unit didn't provide much room for its four inhabitants to sit up, but they managed anyway, rubbing their eyes and blinking against the harsh artificial light. They gazed at a large Asian man, who was asking them a question: "Who are you people?" He had the voice and apparent mood of a rottweiler. 

They blinked at him in confusion, partly because they didn't quite know the answer to his question, and partly because they had somehow expected a more pleasant greeting. Perhaps it was both.

The man with the brown hair and graying temples stepped out of the unit and spoke first, though doing so required him to sift through the strange mathematical formulae swimming through his thoughts. "I am ..." He paused, gazed at his companions - and their familiar uniforms -- for a moment, then held out his hand to the man who greeted them.

"We're the Fantastic Four," he declared, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. "I'm Reed Richards, this is Sue Storm, her brother Johnny, and Benjamin Grimm..."

By now, the man was laughing uproariously.

"Is there a problem?"

"You guys can't be the Fantastic Four," a Caucasian pointed out. "You have any idea what year it is?"

Reed dropped his hand to his side, realizing it wasn't going to be shaken anytime soon. Something about the second man's question perplexed him, but he wasn't sure why.

"The year? I believe the year is Nineteen ..." He trailed off, realizing that didn't sound right.

Now both the Caucasian man and the Asian man were laughing, but the young woman to their right just studied Reed and his companions intently. "Are you from the twencen?"

By this time, Reed's other teammates had stepped out of the pod as well. Johnny Storm scratched his head. "'Twencen'? Where's that? Never heard of it." He glared at the laughing men, who looked as if they were about to rupture important blood vessels from their hysterics.

The woman smiled and blushed. She had hazel eyes and dark brown hair pulled into a sloppy ponytail. She, like the other people who occupied the room, wore a dull gray jumpsuit with the letters 'SF' on one sleeve. "I meant, are you from the twentieth century? This is the twenty-first. It's 2099."

Reed gaped and once again looked at his teammates, finding them as shocked as he was, then glanced at the woman, a Ms. Shandra Willis, judging by the name on her jumpsuit.

"Twenty Ninety-Nine? We're that far in the future?" He turned and peered at the mysterious containment pod, examining the machinery contained within. "We might have been time traveling, but my memory is somewhat ..." He trailed off, only to pick up a different train of thought. "Curious: the equipment in this pod has been damaged. It's been fried so extensively -- likely by a massive energy discharge of some sort -- that I can't seem to recognize its original function."

The Asian man -- Dennis Kong -- had an explanation for that. "Yeah, that's probably because the four of you were in it while it was sittin' in the middle of a Voltstorm. I mean, I find it hard to believe you idiots just popped up in the Negative Zone with no idea how you got there."

Reed's eyes widened; entire complicated trains of thought clicked into place. "The Negative Zone?"

The man identified by his suit's nametag as Wade Tyson stepped forward, voice laced with sarcasm. "Yeah, y'know, big freaky alternate dimension ... charged with negative energy ... variable laws of physics ...discovered in the twentieth century by some big-brain named Reed Richards ... you heard of it? No?" He folded his arms. "That's because you're not him."

"Actually, yes, I've heard of it," Reed replied, trying not to sound indigant. "My memory is a bit clouded, but I am who I say I--"

Standing behind Reed, Ben Grimm tapped him on the shoulder. "Reed..."

The Fantastic Four's leader shrugged it off, idly giving a 'one moment, please' hand gesture. "I and my friends _are_ the Fantastic Four. Our memory loss can be easily explained by the effects of the 'voltstorm' in which you claim we were caught--"

Ben poked Reed's shoulder again, harder. His voice was more insistent. "Hey, buddy, you need to--"

"In a moment, old friend. If it's a question of why one of us does not display his well-known rocklike organic--" Both Ben and Johnny started tapping on his shoulder, so the scientist finally whipped around, short on temper. "Oh, for goodness sake, what _is_ -- oh."

Susan Storm, Reed's longtime lover, had sunk to her knees, trembling, appearing visibly ill. Or at least, the parts of her that were visible. Her invisibility was turning itself on and off in erratic patches. "Reed ...help me...!"

"Sue ... Sue, stay calm," he advised, crouching to hold her hand in both of his and look her in the eye. "Focus your thoughts, Sue -- you can control your power, but it requires concentration. That's it ... it's working..."

Sue's body soon returned to full visibility, while Reed noticed his own hands were becoming shaky, losing muscle control. So he repeated his own words to himself, the advice becoming a silent mantra.

Ben looked at his own hands. "Reed ... I ain't feelin' so good, either. Feelin' heavy ... I think we all know what that means."

His hands balled into a fist almost against his will, and he lowered himself to his knees, breathing heavily. His face and hands took on a soiled orange appearance as his body distorted and widened in shape. While unstable molecular fabric of his uniform stretched to accommodate his increase in size, it swiftly became uncomfortable for him to wear gloves over his hands, so he yanked them off. Ben Grimm's skin transformed into a hardened, clumpy mass of orange clay before deciding on a more rocklike, craggy composition. In short, he had become The Thing.

Repulsed by this horrifying sight, the workers inched backward. The only one of them who had previously known about their origin story was Shandra, who was aware of it general terms. She was just as surprised as her co-workers to witness the gory specifics.

Reed's arms lost all cohesion, which added to the spectacle. The rest of his body, however, remained in its normal shape, as Reed had prepared himself for this.

His calm demeanor as he contracted his arms to their normal shape served as a sharp contrast to that of the workers, especially Dennis Kong. The man grabbed what appeared to be a beam rifle from a nearby workbench and aimed it at Reed and his companions.

"All right, don't move! This is getting out of control! I'm not gonna have this base ripped apart by superpowers, so just calm the shock down!"

"Hey, easy!" Shandra shouted, her hands held up like a hostage negotiator as she approached Kong. "Take it easy, Chief! There's no need to--"

"I'm betting this laser drill can tunnel through even that thick hide," Kong announced, clearly not listening. His eyes were locked on Ben Grimm's mountainous form.

"You really wanna try, pal?" Ben held his gaze, while everyone else in the room shouted things to the effect of, "put the gun down!"

Nobody requested that more emphatically than Johnny, who looked rather nervous and appeared to have an orange glow. "Can we put away the boomsticks, please?" he shouted, voice laced with panic. "I'm gettin' excited and hot under the collar, here -- and I mean literally!"

Kong whipped his attention accordingly from Ben to Johnny, training the laser drill on him as Johnny's body began to ignite. Johnny held out his hands instinctively to protect his face, and two columns of flame erupted from them and superheated Kong's weapon.

It also ignited on Kong's clothing, which just wasn't flameproof enough. Kong dropped the molten drill and patted out his jumpsuit in a panic, then dropped to the floor and tried to smother the rest of the flames by rolling. The pained noises he made in the process did little to soothe anyone's nerves.

Alarms blared, and a heavy alloy panel in a nearby wall slid open to release a trio of F-E drones. The  
fire extinguishing robots swarmed the area and sprayed both Johnny and Kong with foam, along with everything else near them. The flames on Kong's body were easy to put out, but the ones covering Johnny's body like a protective aura were a different story. The drones concentrated their spray foam on him, and by the time they finally covered him with enough of it to douse the flames, they'd just about exhausted their collective supply. Satisfied, the drones retreated into the wall compartment and refueled.

A silence fell heavy over the room, and Johnny wiped the dissolving flame-retardant substance from his face, clearly unhappy. "I don't even wanna think about what that crap just did to my hair." He swept his gaze around the soiled hangar to survey his teammates and the workers. "So. Satisfied we're the real FF? Or do we have to get Galactus over here to vouch for us?"

"That's enough, Johnny," Reed ordered, walking over to his younger teammate while wiping stray foam residue off his sleeve. He turned to address the recovering workers, Dennis Kong in particular.

"So," he found himself asking, "are you satisfied we _are_ indeed the Fantastic Four?"

* * *

"Who is he?" the female member of the Fantastic Four asked as she entered the infirmary. "Or rather, who 'was' he?" 

Shandra looked up from her chair, seeing the newly-identified Susan Storm (or was it Richards?) enter the infirmary, confirm on her face. Hours had passed since their arrival.

Funny, but Shandra had always pictured the First Lady of the Fantastic Four -- the First Lady of the twencen heroes, really -- as being older. Or at least older than the woman who stood before her looked now. Maybe it was the lighting. "How're you holdin' up? Gettin'  
settled in?"

Sue shrugged. "We're trying our level best. It's becoming obvious this place is barely big enough for four workers. Four additional guests is pushing it when one is a literal brick-house and another sets things on fire. Mr. Kong's already put Reed to work helping them repair the portal machinery, though he's trying to talk Ben into doing some heavy lifting and Johnny into spot-welding. Which leaves me..."

"Invisible?"

"Looking for something to do. I'm a people-person, so here I am, seeking out actual people." Sue waited, then repeated her first question. "So ... who is he?"

"He's Keith McLaughlin," she answered, gesturing to the unconscious body in the cot. She'd made it a point to keep vigil on him in her off hours. "Newest resident workin' grunt. And 'is' would be the correct tense, here, or at least I hope."

Sue pulled up a rolling chair next to her, eyeing its design and bouncing slightly to test how sturdy it was. Once satisfied that the brittle-looking piece of furniture could hold even her weight, she studied Keith, then Shandra. "He was caught in the same storm we were, right? I heard the other two mentioning it..."

Shandra nodded. "Yeah. Hit by Zone lightning. I had to carve his labor suit off him myself. Surprised he wasn't burned by the energy ... but who the hell knows what it did to his mind..." She trailed off, her voice shaking. She wiped at her eyes.

Sue was silent, thoughtful. "Were ... you and he ... ? I mean?"

"We're not doin' it," Shandra clarified, less than amused. "If that's what you're thinkin'."

Sue's eyes widened. "No, no... I wasn't. I just ...it seems like you're the only one of the workers here who cares that he's been injured."

"I am. The others call him 'Paranoid Keith' because he's always whining, like he's got a bad feeling about everything goin' on here. He's right more times than he's not, but they give 'im crap anyway. He kinda gets on my nerves sometimes, too, but he's like a little  
brother."

Sue nodded. "I know what it's like to have one of those," she commented with a smile.

Shandra swiveled her chair to face the other woman. "You guys really are the Fantastic Four, aren't you? I ... I can't get used to that. I've seen holos of you with other heroes."

Sue's eyes brightened. "Oh, you mean in history class, or a documentary?"

"Actually ... bootleg holos. Schools've barely said a word."

"Really? Wh-why's that," Sue asked, more than a little deflated. "I mean, not to sound conceited, but we were very well known back in the last century."

"Yeah, there's a lot of information about twencen heroes if you look in the right place. Just not in schools, 'cause it seems like the society's wanted to move on an' forget all about 'em; don't ask me why."

She tilted her head in thought, looking off to the left. "What does the information say about how we ended up?" she asked finally, locking eyes with Shandra.

"That ... the four of you kinda, uh, disappeared in the early part of this century, along with some of the other heroes. I think it had something to do with some wars, or something like that."

"We disappeared?"

Shandra shrugged. "From what I understand, a bunch of records from that time were lost. So it's just a buncha guesswork at this point."

Sue leaned back in her chair, rubbing her eyes. "And we wind up _here_ of all places. Are there any heroes left? The 'super' kind, I mean." That sounded lame to her ears, but she hoped Shandra understood her meaning.

"They were pretty much wiped out by the '50s, or at least the ones you prob'ly remember. But this past year, there have been some popping back up. Spider-Man, Hulk ... Ghost Rider ... a few others. Dunno if they're the same ones you know. Prob'ly not."

"So if the names are still around, then at least some people remembered."

"Well, nobody really forgot your husband, 'cause of the stuff he invented an' discovered." Shandra's smile snuck out, somewhere between embarrassed and mischievous. "That, and ... I got into twencen culture 'cause I kind of had a crush on one of the FF in my younger days."

Sue grinned as well. "Johnny, right?"

Shandra looked away shyly. "Uhh, not quite?"

Sue was about to ask if she meant Reed, but she decided to drop it. "Speaking of history," she said, steering the subject back, "would you happen to have any news archives lying around that we could look at? Just something newsy to help us get a clue what the world as like in this day and age."

Shandra's body language became animated. "Oh, you know what? Yeah, we got those. We're all currentev junkies from spending so long in the Zone, so we get regular feeds."

Sue blinked. "'Currentev'?"

"Sorry. Slang. 'Current events'. We have this big block of data in our computers that we're about to delete anyway to free up space. Some older historical stuff too. I can clear it with Kong, and see if you guys can take a look at it before we hit the button."

"Okay, that'd be great. Thanks," Sue replied with a nod. "Is there anything to eat around here? I'm starving."

"Oh, that. No, not really. We have food and snack rations, and we have to conserve both between shipments. And Stark/Fuji can't be bothered to send us shipments more than once a month, so we're gettin' pretty low again."

"Ah." Sue had seen the company name on a few walls, and she filed that knowledge away for future reference. She didn't doubt that Stark/Fujikawa was the latest iteration of her old friend Tony Stark's ever-present company.

The silence stretched across a minute, and Shandra caved. "You're dying to know who my crush was on, aren't you?"

Sue shrugged, grinning. "It's possible."

* * *

It turned out that ignorance was bliss. 

Once the Fantastic Four had obtained permission to view the base's news archives, they discovered just how badly (and how often) a world could go wrong in nine decades. The United States stopped democratically electing presidents in the 2000s, immense corporations called "megacorps" rose to prominence in the following decades, a thermonuclear war ravaged the country, mutants were rounded up and placed in prison camps, and the megacorps soon annexed entire countries.

But the most distressing events were more recent: the reemergence of the Four's old nemesis, Victor Von Doom, and his eventual takeover of the United States itself. "Says here," Ben reported gravely, "that Plateface was kicked outta office pretty hard by the new president, Steve Rogers. Yeah, _that_ Rogers."

Johnny's eyes widened, and he peeked over Ben's shoulder at the screen. "You mean Captain America? That's good, right?" He then skimmed the article in question. "Oh ... uh, guess not."

"Yeah, guess not," Ben confirmed. "He's more like 'Captain UnAmerican'. Before Doom got revenge, it says President Rogers here had a buncha heroes killed off f'r goin' against his regime." He blinked, turning to the others. "So what does this mean? The U.S. of A. was better off with Doom at the wheel?"

Reed who had been quiet for much of the fact-finding, spoke up. "I find that distinctly unlikely." His words were uncharacteristically bitter. He turned on his heel and exited into the hallway, leaving his teammates to look at each other in surprise.

"I'll go talk to him," Sue declared, standing up and striding out after him.

Then it was down to Ben and Johnny, and a tense silence fell over the room. Ben continued to read the articles; Johnny leaned against a wall and watched.

* * *

By the time Sue found him, he was in the hangar bay, scowling like a four-year-old in time out. He crouched beside the open containment pod and studied it closely; Sue watched him for a few minutes. "Are you okay?" she asked him finally? "Reed?" 

"It seems this era needs us," he declared simply.

"Yeah, it's in pretty bad shape, looks like." She slowly stepped forward. "The Doom thing was a shock, wasn't it?" When he didn't reply, she went on. "The article said nobody's been able to prove whether or not that's the Victor Von Doom we know."

Reed looked up at her. "It doesn't make him any less of a threat. A Doctor Doom who operates under the same modus operandi doesn't need to be the original in order to be dangerous."

"Just like we don't need to be the originals in order to be the Fantastic Four."

Reed paused. "What are you saying?"

"I've been remembering more and more about who we were in the twentieth century, Reed. We all have. But..." She brushed her bangs away from her eyes in frustration.

"But what, Sue?"

"But there's something wrong with the memories. Or with mine, at any rate. It's like ... it's like I'm not the one who experienced them."

Reed stood up, now completely interested. "Go on..."

"It's like those TV shows where they show a flashback or dream sequence, but of course it's in third person, which a flashback shouldn't be. I'm not saying I'm dreaming in third person, but ... as I said, it feels as if the events happened to someone else. I can't remember ever experiencing what my memories suggest, almost as if I have no frame of reference for what it should feel like."

"Give me an example."

Sue thought for a moment. "Well, you realize that we had a son named Franklin, right?"

"Yes, I recall that piece of information."

Sue pointed at him, vindicated. "Exactly! It's a piece of information. I know the general details -- the what, where, and when. But ... but I don't know what it's like to hold him in my arms. Or to sing him asleep. Or to even give _birth_ to him!"

"You don't know, or you don't remember?"

"I don't know!" She was on the verge of tears by this point. "I don't know what it's like; I've never experienced it. It's part of my memories, but I don't have anything tangible to attach it to."

"Well, memories do fade over time."

"Reed. You're not getting it. Even with faded memories, I can recall sensory experiences if I try hard enough. In most cases, the sensory experiences are what trigger the memory in the first place. Like smelling candles, and being reminded of a birthday party. Or feeling warm water, and remembering a time relaxing in a hot tub. Or ... or petting a kitten, then remembering one time you tried to pet a stray who scratched you with its claws! I know, logically, that my brain is supposed to be making those kinds of connections, because that's some knowledge in my head from acting classes and psychology books."

"But you can't find the mental triggers."

"Can _you_?!" Sue was shouting by this point, desperate to get her point across. "Can you? Have you even thought to look?"

Reed looked away. "No ... I haven't. It hadn't occurred to me. I've been so busy--"

"With the grunt work the workers here are putting you up to," she finished for him. "I know." She stepped forward, more confident. "You've never really known much about what to do with body experiences, even before you could stretch. I know that much. And no, that's not an insult. I asked Johnny and Ben about it earlier, and they had to admit they were noticing the same thing."

Reed scratched the back of his head. "But ... let me see if I have this straight: you're saying we cannot be the real Fantastic Four because our memories of prior experiences are incomplete? As I told the workers, it could the a result of any number of--"

Sue placed her fingers to his lips to quiet him. "I know. And it's possible. So let me ask you this: do you remember what it's like to be in love with me?"

Reed's eyes widened. He gave up all resistance and pondered this as Sue withdrew her fingers. "All right. I'll look into it." He glanced down at the pod. "I'll start with this, in fact. It _is_, after all, where we were first found." He crouched once again, tracing his fingertips along the pod's hull. When he spoke again, it was more to himself than to her. "The equipment was partially melted by the Zone lightning, but I'm certain I can discern what they once were, and their original functions."

He glanced back at Sue, meeting her gaze. "It's becoming clear that this pod holds very large pieces of the puzzle."

He was about to say more when a loud slamming noise echoed through the base station. It sounded metallic, as if one of the thick walls had just caved in under a tremendous impact. Alarmed, Sue and Reed glanced at each other and raced out of the hangar and toward the source of the sound: the break room.

* * *

"Okay, you wanna level with me?" Johnny had asked a few minutes earlier, when he absolutely couldn't stand being ignored anymore. "How d'you feel about Sue was saying earlier." 

Ben had refused to answer.

"Ben? Buddy?"

Still no answer, and Johnny'd tried again. "Listen, I don't want to believe she's right, either, but if she is, and she can convince Reed--"

"Just. Shut. Up." Ben had swiveled the chair around to glare at the blonde-haired man.

"Oh yeah, just bully me, why don't you. Here I am, trying to hold a conversation with you when you've been ignoring just about everyone, throwing yourself into work, and just acting like a total--"

"Button it, Matchstick, 'fore I really lose my temper."

Johnny had refused to flinch. "Oh, yeah. You'll break me in half. Funny how somebody who can't even stand what he's become is so ready to throw his new weight aroun--"

"THAT'S ENOUGH!" Ben had bellowed, swinging a stony fist in Johnny's direction with pile-driver force. If Johnny hadn't anticipated this and sidestepped in time, the fist would have caved in his skull as easily as it dented the steel alloy wall.

"Wow..." Johnny had breathed, catching his breath and kneeling, listening to the audible pounding of his own heart. He'd instinctively flamed on, surrounding his body in a blaze that'd threatened to carry him upward off the floor. "Now _that's_ adrenaline."

Ben was incredulous. "You cocky, empty-headed little-- I coulda killed you!"

Johnny's grin had beamed brighter than his flame. "Had to break the tension somehow, didn't I?" More seriously, he'd dissipated the fire around his right hand and touched Ben's shoulder. "And you have to do something with your anger other than keep it bottled  
up, right? Or somethin' even worse could happen."

Ben had batted away his hand. "Y'don't get it, do ya? You just made it even _clearer_ how dangerous I am! How dangerous this body is!" He'd turned to exit the room. "Do me a favor: next time you wanna give somebody a pep talk? Forget it."

Presently, as Ben departed, Johnny canceled his fiery aura and slumped in his chair. He closed his eyes, listening to his own breathing and heartbeat and the entrance of Sue and Reed. Both sounded incredibly concerned.

The last of his adrenaline evaporated with his flame, leaving only frustration.

* * *

**NEXT: "Only Human"**


	2. Only Human

_**From Reed Richards' private journal, 20th century** _

I have ruined their lives.

Weeks have passed since our fateful space flight in my prototype rocket, and I am haunted by the betrayal on their faces after we crashed back to Earth.

Sue, Johnny, Ben ... each was irreversibly altered in his or her own way. Sue has become frequently invisible, feeding into my private fear that there will be a day when I will never see her again. Johnny's fire-based power (pyrokinesis? Still inconclusive) fits in alarmingly well with his  
impulsive personality -- a potentially dangerous combination. And Ben, my old friend, glares at me with disgusted eyes now housed in a body vastly distorted from anything human.

I deserve his disgust. I deserve a fate worse than death for being so arrogant as to ignore their  
objections (Ben's in particular) for the sake of my own dream's fulfillment. But as long as I'm alive,  
their chances of survival improve, as does their potential to be cured.

Still, until that cure can be found, my friends and I must put ourselves to use in the service of humanity. Perhaps in that way, I can be forgiven of my sin of hubris, and they can hold onto what remains of their humanity.

* * *

**Issue Two, Volume One**

**"Only Human"**

**Written by David Ellis**

**Edited by Jason McDonald**

**Chief Editor: Michael Shirley**

* * *

**The Negative Zone, The Year 2099**

The planetoid's surface looked as lifeless as he felt.

Benjamin Jacob Grimm's large blocky fingers scraped across the cratered ground, craggy orange against craggy gray. He felt a certain ... kinship with the terrain, which unnerved him. He knew that his skin wasn't technically made of rock; it was instead composed of a hardened epidermal substance thick enough to serve as armor. As he saw it, he was encased in a giant callus thick enough to stop a missile.

"Maybe I shoulda let Kong cut me open," he muttered, recalling the recent incident in which a man named Dennis Kong, operations chief for this Stark-Fujikawa maintenance facility in the Negative Zone, had threatened to bore into him with a laser drill. Suddenly, that didn't seem like such a terrible fate.

He exhaled once again, adjusting the breathing mask that covered his face from heavy brow to heavy chin. Without it, the Negative Zone's inherent atmosphere would burn his lungs and poison his blood. In his current mood, the temptation to yank off the mask and take a deep breath was staggering.

Almost a full Earth day before, Reed Richards, his best friend and teammate, had revealed that he and the rest of the recently-awakened Fantastic Four were actually clones of the twentieth-century heroes. And this a matter of hours after they'd found themselves on this planetoid with no idea how they'd arrived. The memories they carried in their heads were artificially-implanted, and their first true experience was being bathed in cosmic radiation from a bolt of Zone lightning that'd filtered into their housing pod.

"Cosmic radiation," he whispered as he studied his hands, "that turned me into _this_." He clenched his fists, gritting his teeth. "Here I am, Aunt Petunia's favorite nephew, gettin' a chance t'start a new life in a new century as a clone. So what happens? Do I get t'get used ta that, an' see what that's like as a human? Naw, I get zapped again, an' I turn into a big ugly rock, again!" He took a deep breath, feeling himself getting worked up.

"Guess that's all I'll ever be," he spoke aloud. "I'll always be a _Thing_."

* * *

"What was that thing you used to say back in the twencen?" Shandra Willis asked Johnny Storm as they worked on the damaged Negative Zone jumpgate. "'I'm a flamer'?" 

Johnny, who had been merrily spot-welding a metal panel with his finger up until that point, turned and gaped at her. In the short time he'd known her, he'd discovered that Shandra's affection for twentieth-century pop culture often led to some very awkward moments. As nice as it was to meet someone in the year 2099 who remembered that Johnny and the rest of the Fantastic Four had existed in the 1990s, this was one such awkward moment.

"Uh, no," he replied finally. "It's 'Flame On'. Y'know, when I'm turning on my flame power? 'I'm a flamer' means ... Something totally different."

"Uh, speaking of flames..." Shandra mentioned, her worried eyes locked on Johnny's blazing fingertip.

He glanced back at his hand and handiwork, realizing he'd heated up the metal just a bit too much: the durable metal alloy was now molten in that spot. "D'oh!" he exclaimed with a wince before quickly drawing the heat back out of the spot-weld. He was too late; the surface was already blackened and warped.

"'D'oh'. Another fun twencen term," Shandra commented, a smile quirking her lips. "Homer Simpson, right?"

"Yeah, it was even put in the dictionary." He eyed her for a moment with interest. "I hear this era has some pretty strange slang goin' on. Like I hear 'shock' a lot. The way it's used, I'm guessing it's a substitute for the F-Word?"

She nodded. "Sort of. It's more like a replacement."

"Why's that? Did somebody decide the F-Bomb shouldn't be used anymore, and people got creative?"

"That might be it; I dunno. It's been around a longb time."

"Well, shock." He repeated the word a few more times to get used to it in that context. "Y'know, that's just not as much fun to say. Is 'cool' still around?"

Shandra thought about this. "Uhm, not really. I mean, I still hear it from time to time, but it's mostly said by twencen junkies like me."

Johnny chuckled. "It's gonna be a sad day when that word is laid to rest. I think it's been around as slang since the Sixties or Seventies. Uh, the Nineteen-Sixties and Seventies, I mean." He scratched the back of his head, frowning. "But then, I'm just runnin' on fake memories, so what do I know?"

Setting down her ratchet apparatus, Shandra placed a hand on his shoulder. "So you're upset about what Reed found out about the four of you?"

"First Sue, then Reed," Johnny clarified. "And why wouldn't I be? I just found out we're just ... copies of them with memory implants. That's hard to take, y'know? But Reed an' my sister are both positive on this, and one can be wrong about somethin', or the other can, but not both at the same time."

"Ben's takin' it kinda hard, too," she commented, drawing her knees up under her chin where she sat.

"Yeah, hardest of all of us, not that I blame 'im. I haven't seen him since we found out -- and a little bit before that he punched a wall so hard he left a dent in it." He conveniently left out that he'd goaded Ben into throwing the punch, in order to release Ben's pent-up frustrations. It hadn't worked out very well.

Shandra wiped a sheen of sweat off her forehead with the back of her arm. "I heard he's been takin' long walks outside the station. Just ... walkin' around the station, tryin' to get his head together." She looked toward the exit door. "Good thing he thought to bring a breathing mask."

Johnny shrugged. "Yeah, but he can survive without, as long as he holds his breath. He's got strong-enough lungs for that, and he's pretty well-armored for harsh environments. I have memories of him doing deep-space and deep-sea stuff for Reed back in the day." He walked over to a window and peered out into the Negative Zone's nightmarish expanse. "And if I remember right, once upon a time, this place had a breathable atmosphere. Not sure why." He turned back to face her. "The Zone always looked weird, but now it looks diseased, y'know?"

Shandra picked up her ratchet tool and fidgeted with it. "Well, I dunno what it looked like before, so I'll take your word for it..."

They were silent for a minute or two, which Johnny couldn't stand, so he started on a new subject. "So, how 'bout dinner?"

Shandra's eyebrows reached for the ceiling as she eyed him. "'Scuse me?"

He shrugged. "Just for somethin' to do on our next time off. I figure goin' out and finding a good restaurant is out of question, and there's no telling what kinda movies they get in the Negative Zone--"

"Are you asking me out?"

"Well, uh, I admit, we wouldn't have much to work with, but..."

"Uh, sorry, not interested." She said that as gently as she could, trying not to upset him.

"Okay, fair enough, I guess." He wanted to ask why, but something about Shandra's expression made him change his mind.

"Hey, Storm," Wade Tyson called out from the doorway to a corridor. "Got a project for you."

Johnny moved away from the window, and looked at the other man. "Can it wait...? I've got this welding thing with Shandra..."

"No, it can't wait," Wade barked, getting in Johnny's face. They were both blond men in reasonably good shape, but 'Landshark Wade' was taller, more heavily built, and more imposing, with arms covered with tattoos. "Now get your butt in gear."

Shandra stepped toward the two men, hands on her hips. brow furrowed. "Hold on, Landshark. I thought you weren't workin' this shift."

"I'm workin' overtime, all right? We're short on help, in case you haven't noticed, so if a certain little slacker would pitch in an' help...!" He grabbed Johnny's arm and dragged him into the corridor.

"Hey!" Johnny protested. "I've been helping out! C'mon, what's goin' on here? Where're we going?"

"Outside," Wade answered. "We gotta fix somethin', so you an' me have to suit up." They entered the hangar, there the yellow labor suits were stored, and Wade directed Johnny to the one he'd be using.

Johnny scowled and strode over the bulky hydraulic frame. A stenciled name on its chassis designated it as belonging to Keith McLaughlin, a worker who was nearly brain-fried by Zone lightning mere days before. "...Yes sir," Johnny mumbled.

* * *

"Well, yeah, this is a mining operation," Dennis Kong confirmed as he sat at his desk and met Reed Richards' stare. "What'd you think it was?" 

Reed was never a violent man, but he was known for being habitually calm, he nonetheless carried an intellectual intensity that refused to be ignored. "You'd stated previously that this was a maintenance operation. 'Maintenance Flight Nine' is this group's official designation."

Kong rubbed his brow, looking very tired. "We perform maintenance on other platforms' mining machinery when they need it," he explained slowly and clearly, as if speaking to a four-year-old.

"So Stark/Fujikawa and other Earth corporations are strip-mining the Negative Zone, depleting its resources."

"What's wrong with that?"

"In the previous century," Reed explained, "the Zone was steadily, inexorably heading toward a total collapse. The rapid depletion of this dimension has only hastened its decay."

"How the hell does someone deplete an entire dimension? It's an alternate universe, Richards! It's infinite; it'll go on forever, and there's more than enough of it to keep us in business for--"

Reed slammed both palms on Kong's cold hard desk and leaned forward, glaring. "This dimension is not infinite, Mr. Kong! It had reached the limit of its outward expansion long before I found it in the twentieth century. Now it is receding back into its  
central point, taking all of its contents with it. It will soon reach critical mass, Mr. Kong, and I promise you, it will be within your lifetime." At that point, he realized how hard Kong was staring at him.

"Off. The. Desk," Kong ordered, and Reed complied, embarrassed that he was overstepping his bounds. "Thank you. I'm only gonna say this once: respect me and the job that goes on here, or leave. My people and I went through the trouble of rescuing the four of you from the Voltstorm, but we haven't heard a single 'thank you' yet!"

"Mmm-hmmm," Reed muttered, pondering this with a finger pressed to his pursed lips. "Interesting. The way I'd heard it from Ms. Willis, you and Mr. Tyson had to be talked into making the 'rescue' effort, even though your own injured teammate was out there as well. And you waited until the storm was over." He locked eyes once again with the operations chief. "Perhaps I'd heard it incorrectly."

"Maybe you did," Kong replied evenly. "Are you bound and determined to take me to task on everything you think is wrong, Mr. Richards?"

Reed opened his mouth to respond, then closed it, frowning. "That was not my intent when I came in here," he answered finally. "I ... I am merely concerned--"

"Well, don't be. Focus on your own business, which includes helping us fix things around here when we need it, and keeping your people under control."

"By 'my people', you mean the Fantastic Four."

"If you can even be called 'people'. You said you and the other three turned out to be clones, right?"

Reed's right eyebrow twitched at Kong's use of the word 'clone'. The implication that he was neither the real Reed Richards nor even 'human' was starting to gnaw at him.

Susan Storm didn't have to look up from her electronic bookkeeping assignment to know Reed had entered the break room. "You're upset."

Reed stopped in his tracks and looked at her. "It's that obvious?"

Sue, parked at a table, happily making use of the computer, nodded and smiled. "Pretty much. Not only could I hear parts of your conversation with Kong, well ... it's written all over your face."

He blinked, confused. "But you just now started looking at my face."

She shrugged. "It's a gift."

"Or memory programming."

Sue's eyebrow raised. "How do you know it's not genetic? Behavior is just as much nature as nurture, and I'm positive the original Sue was good at reading people before she ever took classes for it." She saw Reed approaching her table to pull up a chair, and her eyes widened. "Reed -- wait!"

Too late. He banged his knee on something he couldn't see, stumbled, and fell across the chair he was trying to reach in the first place. "Ow!" He looked around to see what he'd tripped over, and he witnessed another chair materializing into view. He blinked and looked up at Sue. "An invisible chair?"

Sue's expression struck a delicate balance between apologetic and amused. "Sorry. I was practicing my multitasking. Seeing how many ways I could divide my attention and keep everything together. So I'm doing spreadsheets for Kong while making different things  
invisible."

Reed didn't so much stand up as seemingly lose cellular cohesion and reform himself into a standing position. "I suppose experimentation with your powers should be encouraged," he told her, "but a chair? That's a disaster waiting to happen."

She grinned impishly. "Or a prank. You should've seen the look on Wade's face when it happened to him a half-hour ago." Then her face scrunched into a distasteful scowl. "Of course, he was hitting on me, so he had it coming."

Reed took a slow breath. "That ... reminds me. In keeping with the evidence supporting our status as clones of the original Fantastic Four ... would that mean...?" His confidence was failing. "Would that mean the two of us are not actually married?"

Not sure how to answer that, Sue looked off to the side with a frown, pondering the question. "I ...don't know, Reed."

Before she could say more, a voice spoke over the intercoms, "Testing, one, two, three. Testing, one, two -- gah, can't figure out this stupid thing works."

"It's Johnny," Reed recognized, moving closer to a speaker.

Another voice reprimanded Johnny over the frequency -- this one sounded like Landshark Wade. "Hey, will you stop playin' with the coms, you moron? We got a job to do."

* * *

Dennis Kong heard the exchange as well, on the intercom in his office. He couldn't help doing a double-take. "What the--? Are they in the labor suits? That makes no sense ... I thought Wade was off duty..."

* * *

"Okay, okay," Johnny relented in response to Wade's reprimand, and he tried to turn off the communication system's broadcast function. Not having much luck at that, he looked around at his surroundings. He and Wade had ventured out of the base's hangar and onto the planetoid's pockmarked surface. The Zonescape was a net of purple energy at the moment, making Johnny feel incredibly tiny by comparison. 

He looked up and found Wade hovering several yards ahead, waiting for him to catch up. "So, what're we supposed to do?" Johnny asked.

"First," Wade replied, "we get you acquainted with your labor suit's systems. Can't afford to make mistakes out here."

But Johnny was still amused by the name of his yellow hydraulic outfit. "'Labor suit'? Sounds like I'm supposed to give birth in this thing!" He took a moment to examine the frame. "Y'know, it's bulky enough, I probably could."

"Never thought I'd be the one to say this," Wade said, "but will you be serious for one minute? You've got some heavy equipment in that frame -- propulsion thrusters, grappling arms, power tools -- but if you don't know how to use them--"

"Oh, c'mon, propulsion thrusters?" Johnny interrupted, hitting a button. I know how to use those -- WHOOOAH!" He took off like a rocket, skimming past Wade and away from the base station at top speed.

"Storm!" Wade shouted. "Storm, what the shock're you doing? Go any faster an' you'll fly right off this 'toid!"

Johnny was whooping and cheering too loudly to hear him. "Woo-hoo! This is awesome! Bet I could break a land speed record with this baby!" He made a mental note to find out later what the current speed record was. Breaking it one way or another was officially on his to-do list.

A loud pinging signal interrupted his revelry, and was followed by a sputtering noise. He was out of fuel already; it figured. However, he had already gained enough momentum that a little thing like a lack of fuel didn't slow him down much. So he tried the braking mechanism. That didn't help much, either.

The good news was that the planetoid's terrain was reasonably flat for quite a long stretch ahead of him; the bad news was that there was a steep dropoff at the end of it. He was about to race off the edge of the planetoid. Luckily, the labor suit was equipped with the ability to steer; Johnny took advantage of that and hung a sharp right. He debated pulling a U-turn to head back to Wade and the base, but this was too much fun.

Half a minute of experimentation with the suit's capabilities later, Johnny was having the time of his life. Then he finally ran out of momentum and slowed to a stop. Still, he was grinning like a six-year-old when Wade caught up to him. "So, what d'you think, man?" a cheerful Johnny asked. "Think I have the hang of this?"

"You know much it costs to keep these things fueled?" Wade demanded. Then he sighed and shook his head. "Never mind. You remind me way too much of myself. I did the same thing when I first climbed into one of these things."

"You did?"

Wade chuckled. "Yeah, only I hit one of the station walls instead. That's why they call me 'Landshark Wade'. Kong was pissed at me for a while, but he got over it. Now he's my best friend."

"Cool."

"But you almost killed him the first day you were here, an' that's not 'cool'." Wade Tyson's tone had turned mean.

"Wha...?"

"You almost killed him," the worker repeated. "You an' the others. 'The Fantastic Shockin' Four'. Sproutin' those powers an' attackin' us, when all we did was save your little--"

"We didn't attack you, moron!" Johnny felt his body temperature soaring. "Our powers just ... happened! We were tryin' to control 'em, then you guys just freaked out! Kong was the one with the laser gun, not me!" He took a breath. "That, and he wasn't burned!"

"Only 'cause the F-E drones got to him in time."

Johnny frowned, knowing Wade was right. When Kong was set ablaze by Johnny's accidental flame blast, the operations chief had tried smothering the flames by rolling on them. However, if the Fire-Extinguisher robots hadn't been there, there's no telling what might've happened to Kong. "Okay, fine. So what're you gonna do with me?" He was finding it hard to breathe.

Landshark Wade chuckled. "I'm not gonna do anything. I'm just gonna let that leak I put in your suit take care of everything for me."

"What?" Johnny started coughing, realizing his lungs were beginning to burn.

"The Zone's got a poison atmosphere, Storm," Wade went on. "It doesn't take a big hole to let it in -- just a tiny, slow leak. Then, when you drop, I can just report that it was an equipment botch."

Another voice cut in over the com system -- a rough, gravelly voice. "Yeah? Well I hope they still make body casts in this day an' age, Junior," Ben Grimm declared, "'cause it's Clobberin' Time, an' you're gonna need one!"

Wade caught the sight of a large rocky form reflected in the faceplate of the suit Johnny was wearing. His own suit was too slow in turning around, and huge craggy hands grabbed the hydraulic frame and pulled.

Ben ripped apart the labor suit the same way an overzealous football fan might rip open a bag of corn chips on Super Bowl night. Wade sucked in air out of sheer surprise, and it felt like a pair of white-hot stars had made themselves at home in his lungs.

"Hold on, kid," Ben told Johnny before holding his breath and removing his facemask.

The breathing apparatus -- created by Reed Richards on the spur of the moment -- came with its own comm unit so Ben could speak to the coworkers when he labored outside. Johnny remembered that he hadn't turned his suit's intercom off; Ben must've heard the entire conversation. He held his breath and let Ben open his labor suit (the careful way), readily accepting size-adjustable facemask so he could breathe clean air. "Thanks."

Ben, holding his own breath, didn't reply, but his expressive eyes indicated, don't mention it. He helped Johnny close the suit's hatch, then he turned to the side as if noticing an incoming arrival.

In fact, there were four arrivals. Two people in labor suits who Johnny assumed to be Shandra and Kong raced toward them, keeping pace with Reed and Sue, who were seemingly surfing on a platform of thin air. Sue's invisible force field, Johnny guessed. He also guessed the shock was about to hit the fan.

* * *

"What the million-volt shock is going on, here?" Kong demanded, once everyone was back at base. "Why's everybody trying to kill each other the minute my back's turned?" 

Wade was being carted off to the infirmary, and Johnny was still taking occasional breaths from the facemask. He succesfully stifled the urge to claim, 'Landshark started it.' Instead, he answered, "why don't you ask your psycho buddy?" Which was only marginally more mature.

"Yeah, I heard the conversation," Kong pointed out. "I just can't believe Wade would pull something like this."

Sue eyed the operations chief skeptically. "I somehow find that hard to believe."

"Well, okay, he had this whole list of emotional problems when he first started, and I think there was something about some run-ins with the law," Kong admitted, "but all that was black-carded. And I figured with all the time he's been here, he'd be past all that."

"And here I thought I was born yesterday," Johnny muttered.

Kong stepped closer to Johnny, looming over him. "I don't think you're completely innocent in this."

Ben, in turn, loomed over Kong. "What're you tryin' ta say?"

"I'm saying that the four of you have been nothing but trouble in the short time you've been here. You've been handy with repairs, yeah, but every time you lose your temper, something gets smashed or somebody gets sent to the infirmary. That costs us time and manpower we can't spare, and it needs to stop."

"What is this?" Ben protested. "One o' your people tries t'commit murder, an' we're still the ones who get yelled at?"

"To be fair," Reed observed, "we are putting quite the strain on their already-limited resources."

"And your demands aren't helping anything, either," Kong reminded Reed. He walked to a wall map of the Negative Zone, or at least what was controlled by his company. "Stark Fujikawa's been screwing us royally for the past few months. They've heaped so many cutbacks an' jurisdiction changes that it's a wonder he haven't been shut down yet. When Flight Nine was set up, we were supposed to operate in conjunction with the biggest sector Stark/Fuji controlled. Then, not a month into the operation, S/F and the other corporates rearranged their boundary contracts, so the choice sector was someplace else. They all rerouted their resources, so that Flights Two and Three run maintenance on the biggest operations, and we're stuck on the fringe. We're the Flight everybody forgets about ... including the supply shipments."

Johnny, Reed, and the rest of the Fantastic Four exchanged glances. It certainly filled in a few gaps in their understanding of the base's operations.

"So what're you going to do with us?" Sue asked Kong.

Kong shrugged. "I'm leaving that to Stark/Fujikawa. I contacted them just after you guys decided you were clones. Representatives should be here any time now, so don't get too comfortable."

* * *

It turned out the 'representatives' were six Stark/Fujikawa security officers called Watchdogs. They wore brown shirts and metal armor, and Reed had to wonder if they were aware of how much they resembled a bizarre amalgam of Nazi SS officers, 20th century highway patrolmen, and ... something from the comic books he'd read in his youth. 

But the Watchdogs weren't the ones to whom he had to speak; the squad leader -- Sergeant Reyes -- pressed a button on his armor and displayed a hologram of a bald, powerful-looking Japanese man. This man introduced himself as Hikaru, CEO of the corporation, and after a minute of formalities, he requested that the Four submit themselves to Watchdog custody to undergo a DNA scan.

"That actually won't be necessary," Reed informed the businessman, who was still on Earth, "you see, we have discovered on our own that we are not in fact the original Fantastic Four." For some reason, the words held the taste of bitter disappointment for him.

Hikaru regarded this thoughtfully. "'Not necessary'," he repeated, as if trying out Reed's words and deciding he didn't like how they sounded. "How have you come to this conclusion?"

The group stood in the docking bay, as it was the only room large enough to house four workers, six Watchdogs, and four super humans (even if the docked transport vessels took up most of the available space), so Reed simply gestured at the containment pod. "We had been found in this unit, and although a voltaic energy phenomenon had almost destroyed the systems inside, I was able to discern what those systems had originally been."

He paused, then, seeing that he had Hikaru's continued interest, he continued: "First, there were cloning tanks, able to grow an organism from samples of baseline DNA into a full-grown adult. In this case, four adults, and each to age twenty-five."

"Why age twenty-five?" Hikaru asked.

"I honestly don't know," Reed replied. "It was either intentional, or the storm might have marred the cloning devices before the age process could have progressed further."

Getting back on track, he continued: "Second, I noticed the vestiges of equipment designed to subliminally implant virtual memories." He gestured at Sue. "Yet, as Susan had pointed out, those memories were imperfect because they were concrete facts rather than tangible experiences. Whether the imperfections were due to shoddy programming, obsolete technology, or interference from the Voltstorm, I hate yet to determine. Perhaps it's all three."

Despite his air of professionalism and courtesy, the Japanese CEO was becoming visibly restless. "Is there anything else ... 'Doctor Richards'?" Hikaru asked. He seemed unsure that a clone should be given the original's honorific.

"Well, yes, I was getting to that," Reed replied humbly. "Third: there is the matter of the Voltstorm phenomenon itself. The pod's hull was designed to act as a conductor for the Zone lightning, channeling the energy into the pods and into our bodies. The cosmic energy is curiously similar to that experienced by the original Fantastic Four before they first transformed." He took a breath before continuing. "My theory is that while the pod's cloning tanks cultivated the baseline DNA and allowed us to age, the lightning was needed to trigger our superhuman powers."

"Hope there's not gonna be a test on all this," Johnny muttered; Sue elbowed him.

"I see," Hikaru said neutrally. "However, I am afraid a more thorough scan will be needed to confirm your claims..."

"Understandable," Reed answered with a respectable bow.

"...and to determine which corporation, if any, the four of you belong to, for ownership issues."

Reed, Sue, Ben, and Johnny were taken aback by this. "What?" they asked in near-unison.

"If the four of you have been artificially created," Hikaru explained slowly, as if addressing a class of five-year-olds, "that means you are artificial lifeforms, subject to ownership by your creator."

"Ownership?" Ben Grimm bellowed, fighting-mad. "What kinda crap is that? Even clones got rights, too!"

The hologram of Hikaru and the Watchdogs shook their heads.

This just fed Ben's outrage. "Nobody owns Benjamin J. Grimm!"

"Ben..." Sue whispered, placing a hand on his massive arm to calm him.

"Yes, Ben," Reed agreed, "there's already been too much--"

"Too much what? Seems t'me like we ain't done nothin' other'n follow their rules an' act like their houseguests! An' they treat us like property for our trouble! What the hell ever happened t'human rights?"

Reed had to admit Ben was voicing his thoughts.

The Watchdogs surrounding the Four tightened their circle, ready to put Ben in his place if need be. Each pressed a button on his uniform, expanding the armor until the Watchdogs looked more like cyborgs than people. "We're equipped with SIEGE armor: SItuation Emergency GEar," one of them barked to Richards. "So you'd better keep your pet rock on a leash. One more outburst like that, and we'll have to put him down. ."

Ben scowled at the comment. "Yeah, I'll show ya 'pet rock', ya miserable--"

"My question," Reed stated, addressing Hikaru before tensions could escalate further, "is what will be done with us once you have confirmed who created us. For instance, what if we turn out to be ... products of Stark-Fujikawa?"

"There is no record of our company ever attempting to clone Fantastic Four," Hikaru replied, "but in such an event, you would be studied--"

"Studied like lab animals," Reed interrupted angrily. "I'm sorry, but I cannot allow that."

The businessman was indignant. "You cannot--?"

"Just as I can no longer tolerate the willful exploitation and pollution of the Negative Zone." He gestured simply around him to indicate the entire realm, his voice rising with anger and conviction. He glanced at his teammates, and he found the same conviction in their eyes.

"Mr. Richards, you must calm yourself," Hikaru commanded.

Reed's gaze shot over to the hologram. "No, I've stayed silent long enough. I'm tired of playing the diplomat. I'm just as fed up with all the injustices of this era as Ben is. This has to stop!"

"You've stayed 'silent'?" Kong asked angrily. "After the lecture you tried to give me in my office?" He shook his head. "You're full of crap, you know that? You won't tolerate being turned into lab rats? That's all you are. You don't wanna put up with what we're doing with the Zone? You don't have the authority to stop it. You're not the Fantastic Four, so stop acting like you discovered this place!"

Dennis Kong stepped as close to Reed as possible without getting into the Watchdogs' personal space. "In fact, you want to know the funny part? When Dr. Richards discovered this Zone in the Twentieth century, he made all this possible. He did the most damage of all."

Reed Richards, usually the most calm and collected of the Fantastic Four, hauled off and punched Kong in the jaw. No one was more surprised than Reed himself. "I ... I don't know what came over me," he stammered as Kong sank to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

Then five of the Watchdogs went on the offensive, while the sixth ushered the workers out of the room, and the time for words had passed.

Reed temporarily lost his shape as he was struck by a series of taser bolts fired by the Watchdogs. As he went down, Sue turned invisible and two of the officers were flattened by an unseen force. Johnny flamed on and flew above the fray, circling near the ceiling to draw SIEGE fire away from his teammates. And Ben tossed one Watchdog across the room before the remaining two hammered him with energy blasts.

As a dazed Reed watched the fight and slowly pulled himself together, the Watchdog whom Ben had just tossed surveyed the melee from his vantage point on the floor. He pressed a button on his suit, and armor-mounted spotlights turned on, bathing the epicenter of the hangar in a peculiar hue of light. Sue's silhouette could be seen helping Ben with the two still-standing Watchdogs, so he shouted, "Behind you!" to one of them.

The corresponding guard then whipped around and fired a taser blast at Sue, who screamed when the electricity struck her forcefield. Angered at this, Reed enlarged his fists and snaked his arms over to the two Watchdogs, decking them with solid punches.

Johnny was twisting and spiraling around in a flight pattern that didn't make much sense to Reed, as the Human Torch was not evading enemy fire. Then compartments in the walls slid open, and Johnny's plan made sense. Four F-E robots emerged from the compartments, spraying flame-extinguishing foam in all directions in an attempt to smother the flames they sensed. The armored Watchdogs were covered in the foam, which obscured their vision and made their footsteps slippery.

The foam had the potential to do the same to the Fantastic Four, but they knew enough to keep out of range of the spraying. "Heh, good thinkin', Matchstick," Ben complimented Johnny, before picking up one Watchdog and tossing him bodily against the others so that they were knocked off their feet and sent sliding against the wall. Sue finished the job by sandwiching them against the aforementioned wall with a forcefield.

The F-E drones retreated back into their compartments.

"Is everyone all right?" Reed asked as he walked to the defeated SIEGE Watchdogs and took a closer look at their armor.

"We're fine, for the most part," Sue reported behind him. "Although I'm getting a headache the size of this planetoid ... what are you doing?"

Reed glanced up from the Watchdogs. "Oh ... I'm taking a closer look at their technology. Their weaponry is almost too highly-advanced for me to comprehend, but I believe some of these components may be useful."

Johnny lowered himself to the floor, dissipating his flame aura. "So, wait ... now you're snatching their gear? We can do that? 'Cause if one of 'em has, like a music player or something, let me know..."

"It's obvious he has a plan, bic-head," Ben pointed out impatiently. "We just took out their goon squad, so any minute they're gonna break down the door an' take it outta our hides." He turned to Reed, addressing him seriously. "We need to move, pal."

"Agreed," Reed replied, looking up at the Heracles transport vessel. "Do you think you can load our containment pod into the transport, and fly it out of here?"

Ben's smile lit up his craggy features. "Watch me."

* * *

**Next Issue: "Endangered Species"**


	3. Endangered Species

_**From Reed Richards' private journal, 20th century** _

Despite our faults, the four of us are becoming an effective team. My beloved Sue, her brother Johnny, and my longtime friend Ben have accompanied me on mission after mission, world after world. We are the Fantastic Four, and we are hailed by the public as the greatest of 'super heroes', even after the Avengers were formed.

While I could simply attribute our success to my plan to ensure that the four of us attain a positive public image early on, I still cannot help but feel we were meant to be a team from the beginning. After all, why else would I have gone out of my way to enlist my college roommate Benjamin Grimm as a pilot, and my fiancée and her brother as a crew?

Addendum: Actually, upon reading this journal entry a second time, a more honest answer to my rhetorical question occurs to me:

When I had begun my lifelong dream of designing and building my original prototype spacecraft, I had been orphaned for years. My mother had died when I was a child, and I had lost my father a number of years after that. I had sought some kind of approval with my rocket project, which I certainly hadn't gotten from the government officials who had cut my funding. Therefore, in the absence of my parents, I had sought approval from Sue, Ben, and Johnny -- the people in my life whose opinion mattered to me. I made them my crew, and I downplayed their fears regarding the unknowns of space.

Is this how I reward their faith in me?

* * *

**Issue Three, Volume One**

**"Endangered Species"**

**Written by David Ellis**

**Edited by Jason McDonald**

**Chief Editor: Michael Shirley**

* * *

**The Negative Zone, The Year 2099**

"Reed, I trust you have a plan for this," Sue Storm shouted above the racket of metal as the _Heracles Mark IV_ transport vessel threatened to shake itself apart. They'd stolen the transport from a maintenance station's docking bay mere minutes ago, attempting to escape the custody of a very large Earth-based corporation.

"I'm working on it, Susan," Reed replied rather shortly as he studied the vessel's console. Sparks were shooting from it due to the impact the ship had just sustained -- a flight-armored SIEGE Watchdog had just hit it with a missile. "Keep it steady, Ben! We have to outpace out pursuer!"

The ship's pilot, a mountain of rock-like determination named Ben Grimm, scowled at both Reed and their current situation. "Yeah, thanks for _that_ piece of advice, Stretcho," he retorted while keeping the ship as level as superhumanly possible. "Never woulda figured it out on my own. Y'wanna help th' situation? Tell th' dingbat that's tailgatin' us ta knock it off alread--" Another missile rattled the hull. "Aw, f'r the luvva ... I didn't mean it like _that!_"

Johnny Storm fidgeted against his seat harness, both holding onto the straps for dear life and wishing he could be free of them. "Y'know, I suggested we take the Stark-Fuji _flagship_, which is faster an' a heckuva lot more maneuverable... but does anyone ever listen to me?"

Sue took a deep breath through gritted teeth as she fought a blistering headache. "Johnny, d'you think any one of us has the kind of know-how to operate a state-of-the-art corporate flagship on such short notice?" And it was true. While Ben was a pilot and Reed was an intuitive technology genius -- and each was the best at what he did -- they'd had only a minute at most to escape in a spacecraft, and the Heracles was built with blue-collar interface in mind. The flagship, on the other hand, would have probably required years of cadet school to comprehend.

Their pursuers' voice broke in over the comm frequency. "Stark-Fujikawa SIEGE officer Bill Reyes to _Heracles Mark IV_ transport ship: this is your final warning. Surrender, or you will be destroyed."

Reed, the designated co-pilot, pressed the comm button to respond. "Mr. Reyes, please hold while we take your request under lengthy consideration." He then fiddled with the controls to fill the frequency with an ear-splitting feedback screech.

Johnny couldn't help laughing. "Hey, that was pretty funny, man! Betcha _that_ pissed 'im off."

But Reed was deadly serious. "I'm tired of Stark-Fujikawa holding the cards, Johnny. I'm tired of sitting on my hands while they strip-mine the Negative Zone to the proverbial bare walls. We're not just fighting for our lives, here -- we're fighting for this entire dimension. If they want to destroy us, we will _not_ make it easy for them."

"Hey, y're preachin' to the choir on that one," Ben commented. "Suzie, think y'r forcefields can give us a hand?"

Sue peered out of an aft window to keep tabs on Reyes. "We're clones, remember? I don't have the original Sue's experience or stamina. There's no way I could wrap a field around tthisship thick enough to stop his missiles." She'd already over-exerted her power twice that day -- once to ferry herself and Reed outside in the Negative Zone without protective gear, and a second time to defend herself and her teammates against Reyes' SIEGE squad.

She hated to feel useless when her friends needed her. And she was troubled to realized the original Susan Storm had been largely useless to the Fantastic Four in her early years when she'd been the Invisible Girl. Was she, as a clone, fated to follow the same pattern?

Not if she could help it.

Reyes' next missile slammed into the transport even harder than the previous ones, and Sue was almost jarred out of her seat harness. Scowling, she concentrated on the SIEGE officer and realized there _was_ a way she could stop his next missile.

"This vessel isn't going to withstand another impact," Reed shouted, stretching an arm across the cabin to hold in place a coolant tube that had been dislodged. "We need an offensive attack."

"I'm on it," Sue declared, narrowing her eyes. She visualized a sphere of solidified invisible energy, no bigger than a marble, conjuring it inside Reyes' armor. Specifically, inside his forearm missile housing. She expanded it to the size of a golf ball, then a baseball, effectively jamming the missile before it could be deployed.

Sure enough, Sue watched as Reyes' body language betrayed confusion at the weapon's malfunction. "There," she told the others, "I've bought us some time." _And managed not to blow the guy up in the process_, she left unsaid. Then she realized Reed was saying something about electromagnetic interference, but she didn't catch what it was.

Suddenly, Reyes' armored form convulsed, overtaken by a surge of cosmic lightning. A flash of white-hot agony lanced through Sue's brain as the energy was carried across her mental link the spherical forcefield in Reyes' armor. She heard herself scream before she lost consciousness.

They were lost in an electrical storm less than an hour ago," Stark-Fujikawa CEO Hikaru revealed, "but they are still most certainly out there. I have notified every facility in the Negative Zone of this situation, and a security alert has been issued. There are now SIEGE officers stationed at every base." He locked eyes with the cyborg in his office. "However, security is not enough. In order to find the clones of the Fantastic Four, we require _your_ talents."

"Wait, hold up," the hunter-warrior called Oldskool spoke up. "You're sayin' all this fuss is about a buncha clones?" He was a rather large, muscular black man dressed in a tan leather jacket that covered his cybernetic arms. His tank top, cargo pants, steel-toed boots, gold-chain necklaces and earrings all reflected what Hikaru guessed was twentieth-century pop culture fashion.

"Not just any clones," the CEO revealed. The holographic projector on his desk displayed a mock-up of the Negative Zone expanse; he queued it to an 'image capture' of the fugitives. "These clones in particular are derived from the twentieth-century superhumans known as the Fantastic Four, and they have been endowed with the necessary powers and memory implants. They are quite dangerous, as they have already defeated five SIEGE-equipped Watchdogs, with the status of the sixth still in question. Find them, but do _not_ underestimate them."

Oldskool studied the images for a very long moment, deep in thought. "You want 'em dead or alive?" he asked in his customary gruff voice. "And why d'you need _me_ for the job? All due respect: you _know_ I put in my time in the Zone. I'm done with that place. Sir."

Hikaru nodded slightly. "I am well aware of that, Mr. Waylon." He then queued the desk holo to the next image, that of Oldskool's military service picture and dossier. "I am also aware that during your time as a Negative Zone soldier -- before you started calling yourself 'Oldskool' instead of Martin Waylon -- you were the best of the best. You turned the tide in our war against the Zone's hostile races." He locked eyes with the bounty hunter. "I am _also_ aware that you have lost none of your edge. You are needed again."

Oldskool's troubled eyes darted away from his employer and onto the image of the man he once was.

* * *

"Sue?" Reed's voice filtered in, and Sue opened her eyes. 

"What ... ow," she whimpered, holding her head and sitting up. Looking around, she saw Reed, Johnny, and Ben in the _Heracles_' cabin ... or at least shapes of them.

"Are you okay?" her brother asked eagerly.

She tried squinting her eyes to focus on them, but to no avail. "Sort of. Except there's something wrong with my eyes ... everything looks like, well ... what I see when I turn things invis -- oh." Her eyes widened as she realized what had happened.

"Yeah, y'r power went all wonky when y'blacked out on us," Ben revealed, reaching out with a massive hand for a delicate touch. "Turned us an' this whole ship invisible."

She took another look at the bulkheads, windows, and floors of the ship, realizing that they had indeed taken on the same transparent, colorless appearance as her teammates. She knew she possessed the ability to perceive objects made invisible by her gift, but that still raised some questions: "How long was I out?"

"Unfortunately I can't glance at a chronometer," Reed replied, "but I would estimate over an hour."

"That long? And you've been invisible that whole time?" How can you see?"

Johnny shrugged from where he sat on the floor, leaning against the hull. "We don't, unless you count the sky outside. We didn't know what happened at first, and with that Zonestorm going on ... man it was wild. The storm sent us off-course to wherever we are now, but at least it's stopped. So we've basically been improvising, and biding our time until you woke up."

Ben harrumphed. "Feelin' around ain't easy when y'can't feel much t'begin with." He was still in the pilot's seat, only he'd swiveled it around to face the others, for all the good that did.

"We can't see the ship or each other," Johnny went on, "but otherwise the view's awesome." He indicated the expanse around them. The Zonescape was bathed in red and gold, with rivers of white racing along the sky like children at play.

Sue touched the cold cabin wall, which might as well have been a pane of glass. "It's beautiful," she whispered, in awe of the view.

But then, patches of the hull dissolved into view like ugly blemishes, and parts of Sue became opaque as well. Realizing what was happening she concentrated to maintain her influence on the visible spectrum, then turned to her companions. "Oh, sorry ... do you want the invisibility on or off?"

"At the moment, 'on' is preferable," Reed responded, and Sue noticed he was tinkering by touch with some tiny object, "considering we require as low a profile from Stark-Fujikawa as possible. On the other hand, being rendered functionally blind has its drawbacks."

"Like not seeing the instrument panels or whateverit is you're working on," Sue guessed.

He nodded, then held up the device in his hands. "This is one of the items I've confiscated from the watchdogs. My understanding is that it's what rendered your invisible form visible to the unaided eye during our fight with them. It bends the visual spectrum in much the same way you do so that you can be seen. I hoped to successfully mount it on flashlights so we could see our surroundings if you were going to be unconscious for much longer."

"Or if I became a vegetable?"

"There was very little chance of that, given the way your brain is structured to manipulate energy," he explained. "Incidentally, the jolt you received from the Zone lightning allowed you to expand the limits of your power."

Sue leaned her head against the back of her seat. "I figured it was something like that." Her comment was only slightly ironic. "So how powerful do you think I am at this point? Still Invisible-Girl-level, or have I graduated into Invisible Woman territory?

"The latter, certainly, though it wouldn't be wise to overtax yourself." The Fantastic Four's leader glanced around at his teammates,and Sue altered her invisibility accordingly.

"There, she announced. "I made it so that we can see each other and the inside of this ship, but nobody outside will be able to see us. I hope."

Johnny, frowned a bit, as he'd been enjoying the unrestricted view of the Negative Zone. He stood up and walked to a window. "Y'know, it really sucks that these Stark guys'd really wanna mess up the Zone this bad. I mean, what're they getting out of it? Raw material? Bragging rights?"

"It can't be bragging rights," Sue replied. "I was doing bookkeeping for them when we were still at the base station, and from what I could tell, there are no other Earth corporations out here. Stark-Fujikawa's kept the Zone's existence under wraps so they wouldn't have any competition."

Reed turned to her. "What else did you find out?"

"Well," Sue began, "I had to dig deeper and cross-reference files for this, but ... there's a place called the Octagon. It's a prison, reserved for the worst criminals Earth has to offer. But from what I read, nobody seems to know why it's there in the first place. On Earth, the most popular means of disposing of undesirables besides execution is artificial aging. Imprisonment isn't done much anymore, so Dennis Kong and the other operations chiefs aren't sure what goes on in the Octagon. They don't have the security clearance to find out; they just routine maintenance from time to time." She saw Reed becoming increasingly troubled by this, so she touched his shoulder. "Reed? Are you all right?"

Reed looked away, focusing his attention on the device in his hands. "This ... certainly has disturbing -- and familiar -- undertones."

"Familiar? I don't..."

Ben spoke up. "I think I know what's botherin' 'im, Suzie. If I remember right, back in the old days the Four used t'use the Zone t'get rid of a lotta problems the same way."

Reed glanced over at Ben and slowly nodded. "Yes. Unfortunately, there was a time when I -- the first Reed Richards saw the largely-uninhabited Negative Zone as a place to exile the enemies we encountered. The Mad Thinker's android ... the Super-Adaptoid ... even Galactus at one point. At the time, it seemed like a workable solution, but the Fantastic Four's working knowledge of the Negative Zone expanded over time, and such deportation no longer became an option, due to the consequences it reaped upon the Zone's environment and species."

"So, what're you saying?" Johnny asked. "Kong was right? That the first Earthling to screw up this place was Reed?"

Reed nodded slowly. "That was before Richards had realized that lifeforms are connected in the same ways here as they our in our dimension. Living beings existed, and not just individuals or species ... but ecosystems. If one species is affected, other interdependent species are affected as well. Play havoc on an environment, and the indigenous lifeforms suffer. My understanding is that the Fantastic Four were working toward repairing the damage they'd done to the Negative Zone when Earth corporations began to exploit it toward the end of the twentieth century." He looked up at the others. "Now, almost a full century later, this realm is worse off than it's ever been, to the point that all it took for Earth to become the dominant presence was one war. And I have to wonder if Richards himself wasn't the one person most responsible for all that's happened."

All four pondered this in silence for a few moments. Sue finally broke it: "You're not the original Reed Richards."

Scowling, Reed looked away. "Why is everyone so bound and determined to point that out?"

Her face softening, Sue reached out to him. "I didn't mean it that way. I'm saying that you're a clone. You have the original's memories -- or something like them -- but you're _not him_. Reed ... look at me. You are not responsible for every weight he had on his shoulders. You have your own life."

She addressed the rest of them as well, herself included. "We all do. The lives and memories of the original Fantastic Four define us and limit us only as much as we let them. We can use what we know about them as a guide, and we can learn from their victories and mistakes, but it's still our decision what we do with our lives. No one else's." She looked at them seriously. "Right?"

Reed, Ben, and Johnny nodded their agreement. Even so, Reed privately wondered if he'd be able to make peace with his predecessor's history.

He looked peaceful as he slept, Shandra Willis observed as she kept vigil over the near-comatose body of her friend Keith McLaughlin. The two of them -- along with Wade Tyson, another patient in the infirmary -- were Stark-Fujikawa employees, stationed at the Maintenance Flight Nine base in the Negative Zone. Keith had been reduced to his current state by by Zone lightning shortly before the other workers had discovered the Fantastic Four clones. Yet he didn't show any sign of injury or illness; he appeared to be sleeping. Dreaming, even. Content for the first time since she'd met him.

"What a revoltin' development this is," Wade groused, his voice digitally distorted by the respirator that covered his nose and mouth.

Shandra turned to him, lowering the volume on her earbuds so she could hear him clearly; her twentieth-century techno music played on. "Hmm? Oh, that. Y'know, you brought it on yourself."

"Brought _what_ on myself?"

"The lung damage. You tried to kill Johnny," she pointed out," but you ended up getting poisoned by the Zone's atmosphere instead of him. Sounds like poetic justice to me."

"Only 'cause Grimm showed up." Wade's face was partially covered, but Shandra guessed he was pouting like a child.

"What d'you expect, Landshark?" she asked. "They're family -- they take care of their own."

"An' I was takin' care of _my_ own! Those ... those freaks're dangerous. We never shoulda brought 'em outta stasis!"

"We didn't; they brought themselves out."

"They're still dangerous. Just ask Kong." Wade blinked, thinking for a moment. "Where _is_ Kong, anyway?"

"He's negotiating with Stark-Fuji reps," Shandra replied. "He called the big-wigs, and they sent armed Watchdogs. Then there was a lot of arguing, then a big fight 'tween the two groups, then the FF faded. They ghosted the transport, too."

"Told you they were dangerous. Kong agrees with me."

"He didn't exactly approve of you trying to kill them."

"What d'you think he was gonna do with the laser drill that first day?"

Shandra was silent. He had a point.

Wade coughed; the argument had gotten him worked up. "An' anyway, that wasn't the 'revoltin' development' I was talkin' about. I meant, I'm stuck in here watchin' you babysit Paranoid Keith. Not my idea of fun."

She shrugged. "He's my friend I'm takin' care of _my_ own."

Wade chuckled. "You got a weird definition of 'friends', y'know that?"

"Oh, I'm friends with Keith and the FF, and that's a _bad_ thing?" Shandra pressed her point, cutting off Wade's aattempt at a reply. "Why is it okay for _you_ t'make whatever friends you want, but it's not okay for _me_ t'make friends?"

Wade's scowl didn't have to be seen to be recognized. "The friends _you_ make are either wastes of skin or trouble magnets."

"Didn't know you cared. I guess you have a better friend after all," Shandra commented, referring to Kong. "He lets you get away with attempted murder."

The steady beeping of a heartrate and brain-activity monitor suddenly increased its tempo. Shandra realized the monitor in question was Keith's, so she spun around to see the younger man open his eyes.

Those green eyes glowed with a rare hatred; when Shandra gazed into them, she didn't like what she saw.

Acting on Hikaru's executive order, Zone division head Evan Kreiger had seen to it that all the Stark-Fujikawa outposts in the Negative Zone were under a tight security lockdown within an hour of the Fantastic Four's escape. This was a war, after all, and the Zone was under martial law.

Now, almost a full Earth-day after the Four's escape, no fewer than fifty company warships comprised a blockade around the central operations area, preventing any travel in or out of the bborder zones The warships had been created to fight in the war against the Zone's indigenous species; afterward, they were kept in service in case of an attack by the locals or another Earth corp. So far, nothing ruled out the possibility of the Four being products of a rival megacorp, but even if they weren't, they were still dangerous.

Besides the mining operations excavating rare xynium ore from the Zone's planetoids, another major installation that was a major focus of the clampdown was the Octagon, a maximum-security prison with a twofold purpose. The first was the most obvious: the worst undesirables Earth had to offer were stored in a location far away from Earth. The mile-long octagonal prism's second purpose was known only to the top brass in Stark-Fujikawa and those who inhabited the prison: it was a research facility in which the inmates' physical and psychological reactions to Negative Zone confinement were studied. The ratio of inmates who survived their imprisonment to those who died was also a secret guarded by Stark-Fujikawa.

"That coulda been me," Oldskool muttered as he gazed out of a window of the _Cormorant_, a light transport craft passing through the sector. His eyes were fixed on the Octagon's simple shape and complete ramifications. The Zone war hadn't been that long ago, and for a man facing Death Row for his crimes, the choice between the Octagon and military service hadn't been a tough one at all. His dedication as a soldier made him a war hero, and at the time it'd seemed like he'd made the right decision.

But later, months after the war had ended and he'd become a bounty hunter on Earth, he'd finally realized the true tradeoff of his actions: a vast majority of the Zone's known indigenous species had been wiped out in the conflict. He'd condemned billions to die so that he could continue to live.

Not that death was the worst possible fate awaiting an Octagon inmate. A selected few were genetically re-engineered as laborers capable of mining without equipment in the harshest conditions imaginable. These laborers were augmented with diamond-hard claws and the immense strength to dig through rock and ore. Their lungs and other organs were altered to allow them to breath Zone atmosphere and consume waste products. In the process, their intellect was lowered until they were barely sentient and functioned as work animals. Nicknamed "Mole Men", they were the absolute last thing any Octagon inmate wanted to become.

Oldskool slipped his earbuds back on and leaned back in his seat as the pilot steered the craft within visual distance of the Zone's famed Debris Field. The dimension was steadily contracting on itself, its central gravitational pull drawing all planets toward it. Some planets had collided, and the Debris Field was the result. The bounty hunter had been here before; it was the site of quite a few battles during the Zone War. Scattered among the planetoid chunks were pieces of starships, weaponry, and even humanoid bodies.

Closing his eyes, he turned up the volume on the music player integrated with his cyborg hardware. Mournful twentieth-century rap lyrics, deep and introspective, filled his consciousness. _"Only God can judge me, only God,"_ Tupac Shakur's lyrics chorused, _"Only God can judge me now..."_

The pilot's squeaky voice brought him out of his meditation. "Sir? I'm detecting a stealth-cloaked vessel entering the Debris Field."

Oldskool's eyes shot open, and he sat forward in his seat and studied the monitor readouts. "Is it the _Heracles_?"

"Yes sir. Looks that way. It's been rendered invisible on a few wavelengths, but not all of 'em."

"Richards is smart," Oldskool observed. "He's got the ship coastin' without engine power, so they're less likely t'be picked up on infrared. An' hidin' in the debris disguises the ship from motion and mass scans -- there's too much to filter out. Question is," he wondered aloud, "how long do the Four plan to stay in the field? They just biding their time an' laying low, or do they have a reason for being there?"

"'Kay, so run this by me again, Stretcho?" Ben inquired of Reed over commlink. "Outta all th' places t'hide in this obstacle course, why'd we pick this one?" He scowled behind his breathing mask as tiny planetary chunks bounced off both the transport's hull and his own craggy hide. He stood atop the ship with a welding tool in his hand. His task was to repair the damage to the ship now that they'd had a relatively safe place to stash themselves. But as usual, he never passed up a chance to complain.

"Of course," Reed replied. "The composition of the planetary matter interferes with most conventional scans, so as long as we hide in the densely-populated areas..."

"Yeah, yeah, I gotcha," Ben muttered, fusing together thick alloy panels that had been blasted open and warped by SIEGE missiles. "Just keep in mind the 'conventional' part o' that sentence. R'member this is th' future. We've seen what their mining equipment c'n do, but military sensors're a whole other ballgame." He had plenty of military experience to back up his claim: the original Ben Grimm had been an Air Force pilot.

"I'm well aware of that, Ben, which is why I have Johnny planting disruptor beacons on the debris surrounding the ship. Besides, after I modified the _Heracles'_ sensor array, I began picking up some kind of matter-phase distortion phenomenon in this area. I can't help being intrigued."

"'Course ya can't. Our lives'd be easy, otherwise." Ben looked up at Johnny, who was floating several yards from the ship while wearing one of the variable-pressure suits they'd found in the storage bay. He was placing another fist-sized beacon device on a planetoid the size of a city bus, but he didn't seem to be enjoying it. Probably because he couldn't flame on and buzz around the debris like a fighter jet without burning up the suit. Still, he gave Ben a thumbs-up to signal that he'd placed and activated the last of Reed's cobbled-together beacons.

"All the Christmas lights've been strung up, Santa," Johnny announced over the commlink. "I'm on my way back to the sleigh, like a good little nine-to-five working elf."

Ben watched as Johnny kicked off the bus-sized planetoid and swam back to the ship. Tapping a private line to Johnny's comm, he asked, "still haven't got the voice system figured out? I think you were trying t'send that just t'Reed, but I heard it too."

"D'oh! Yeah, you're right.I have it on broadband. Hold on..." A few clicking sounds later, Johnny's voice was once again audible, this time on the right frequency. "Okay, testing, testing ... how's that?"

Ben gave him a thumbs-up. "Better. But y'gotta get the hang o'this, Junior, 'cause there's no tellin' who might be listenin' in."

"Yeah, thanks for the advice, Mom," Johnny retorted. "By the way, you remember back at the base when Reed was telling us that we're all just clones artificially aged to twenty-five?"

"Yeah...?"

"So quit calling me 'Junior.' We're all the same age now. Twencen Johnny was the kid of the group, but I'm not. So treat me that way, okay?"

_Why you little_, Ben thought, biting back an angry retort. But he had to admit Johnny had a point. He'd acted toward his teammates the same way the previous Ben was prone to act, even when the reason for it no longer existed. "Tell ya what: act like you ain't a kid, an' I'll treat ya that way."

"Whatever." The rolling of Johnny's eyes was obvious even with the helmet on. "Wait ... if my memories are about the real Johnny's life ... and I was just born a couple of days ago..."

"Yeah...?"

"Does that mean I'm...? Aw, shock. I'm a virgin all over again."

Ben laughed uproariously at that.

"Hey! Quit laughing! That means you are too!"

"..."

"Twencen Ben _did_ manage to get some back in the day, right?"

"Shaddap!" Ben chased a gleeful Johnny back into the airlock. Stopping at the entrance, he then moved back to his repair detail. "What I wouldn't give for a decent collision repair shop in this neck o' the..." He trailed off as he spotted something outside of the Debris Field: a small spacecraft in an apparent holding pattern. "Crap. Major Tom t' Ground Control," he announced on his link, quoting a now-ancient song lyric, "we got a bogey at nine o'clock. "Don't know if we been spotted, but set another place at th' table just in case."

* * *

"'Set another place' ... that's a good one," Oldskool muttered as he finished suiting up. He was now wearing combat fatigues protected by a tight impact forcefield. He'd been listening in on all communications coming from the _Heracles_ -- protected or not -- with much amusement. Taking on the Four was going to be fun, even though he'd just lost most of the element of surprise. Most, but not all. His cybernetic systems informed him that a positive lock on the Heracles' cabin had been achieved, with two lifesigns positioned therein; the third was in the corridor between the cabin and the storage area, and the fourth was outside, standing atop the transport. 

"Initiating 'port to _Heracles_," he reported to the pilot as he pressed a button on his robotic arm and proceeded to glow a bright green. Teleporting the eight-kilometer distance between the _Cormorant_ and the _Heracles_ wasn't something he could do in his home dimension, but the Negative Zone's physics made such a feat a snap. Or rather, a different sound altogether.

**

ZWARP

**

* * *

He reappeared in the archaic transport's storage area, a large, cold section stacked with crates and repair equipment. One object that certainly didn't look like it belonged there, Oldskool observed, was a containment pod large enough to store four people. According to the intel he'd received, the Four had been discovered it, and Richards had since mined it for answers to their origins. 

One corner of the storage bay held a locker for uniforms and safety suits, and it wasn't hard for him to find it -- someone, probably Johnny Storm, had entered and was removing his space suit while muttering to himself.

"...can't believe I'm a virgin again for the first time! _Is_ it the first time...? Well, yeah, I'm like a couple of days old, but ... man, it's embarrassing. Johnny used to get all kinds of women back in the twencen ... 'course he didn't spend his entire life in the Negative Zone." Having finally struggled out of his pressure suit, Johnny stood there in his Fantastic Four uniform, scratching his head in thought. "_Is_ it possible to get women out here?"

"Not really," Oldskool told him as he fired a stun bolt at the surprised young man, "and believe me, I've tried."

He watched Storm drop to the grungy metal floor, then he opened the door to exit into the corridor. He listened and peeked to check if the coast was clear, then he made his way through the corridor to the cabin.

In the cabin up ahead, he heard voices -- one male, one female. Obviously Reed Richards and Susan Storm, by process of elimination.

"... honestly don't know if they can see us, Reed," Susan said. "The way I've bent the light so that the ship's visible on the inside but not the outside ... it's tiring."

"That, and as Ben pointed out," Reed replied. "we have no way of knowing how effective Stark-Fujikawa's sensors are. So if you can hold out just a little longer..." From the doorway Oldskool could see that Richards was delicately massaging the back of his frustrated teammates' neck in an attempt to soothe her nerves. He wondered if that was an intimate gesture the original Richards was known for.

In any event, Susan Storm's body language indicated that she was responding to the touch, but she was still upset. "Why don't they just shine a spotlight on the area and get it over with? They have lighting technology that can make me visible, so why don't they just use it and stop the waiting game?"

"We could've," Oldskool clarified as he stepped into their line of sight and fired a stun bolt at each of them. "But where's the fun in that?"

Reed and Sue slumped to the floor as the energy bolts' numbing effect kicked in. The Fantastic Four's leader stretched an arm to the control panel and pressed the alert button on the comm system. Oldskool made no move to stop him, because he needed the fourth member to show up as well.

Sure enough, moments after the button was pressed, the airlock in the corridor hissed open to admit Grimm's dense frame. "What in th' name o' Aunt Petunia's house pets is goin' _on_ here?" he demanded as he entered the cabin, stopping abruptly upon seeing the new guest and his friends' limp bodies. "All right, pal, if they're dead, I'll--"

"They're just stunned," Oldskool replied as Grimm surged forward, fists swinging. The hunter-warrior raised a robotic forearm to block an incoming punch; as the clatter echoed across the cabin, Oldskool's other forearm opened up into several sections to reveal a larger arm cannon. "But you got a thicker hide, so I'm upgradin' to lethal force." As he said this, he fired a point-blank energy blast at Grimm's armored chest, knocking the Thing back a few feet.

Grimm grunted, glancing at the singed circular dent punched into his chest, shallow but ugly. "Felt _that_ one, pretty good, Junior, but there'd better be more'n that came from, if y're gonna take me outta the game."

At that, Oldskool raised his cannon arm and sent rapid-fire blasts at his opponent, each shot as damaging as the last. "Don't worry," he replied simply.

Ben Grimm finally hit the floor, his rock-like chest resembling a cratered lunar surface. "'Don't worry,' he says..." He coughed up blood.

Oldskool stood over him, his cannon arm still pointed at his target. "Sorry, man..."

* * *

**

Next Issue: "Danger Zone"

**


	4. Danger Zone

**From Reed Richards' private journal, 20th century**

_I, Dr. Reed Richards, am the most dangerous man in existence. _

_Others have described me that way for years, but it has only now begun to fully sink in that they're right. Less than an hour ago, I stood trial before a galactic tribunal for a seemingly inexcusable crime: saving Galactus' life._

_The Devourer of Worlds had once been near death, but I'd refused to let him die. The outraged tribunal -- composed of virtually all known sentient races, especially the Shi'Ar, Skrull, and Kree empires -- deemed my decision to be unforgivable, and only through calm logic and the testimonies of Uatu the Watcher, the Norse God Odin, and Galactus himself was I exonerated of guilt. Not for committing the act itself, but because we managed to prove that I had performed a service to the universe itself by maintaining the cosmic balance._

_My memory of the trial is fading quickly, as is the case for all the trial's participants. Soon, all we will have left of the incident will the the instinctive knowledge that the trial took place and that the final verdict was in my favor. Thus, I am logging as much into my journal as I can remember. I may delete this later, but for now I simply wish to record what I and the rest of the Fantastic Four had experienced, so I can make some objective sense of it._

Why_ did I save Galactus' life? Cosmic-balance rationale aside, I can't help but think that once again my scientific curiosity had won out. Here was a lifeform older than our current universe, and who had participated in the Big Bang. His presence, in fact, proved that heavily-debated scientific hypothesis to be correct. The idea of allowing such an entity to die is quite simply repulsive to me. _

_It seems that once again I have hung the fate of the cosmos on my scientific curiosity. I've certainly endangered Earth and my family in this fashion on numerous occasions. At one point I even exiled Galactus to the Negative Zone, of all places. I still have no guarantee that Galactus' death would have turned out to be harmful to the universal balance. Only time will tell._

_I am the most dangerous man in existence, and I have no intention whatsoever of stopping. Why? I honestly don't know._

* * *

**Issue Four, Volume One**

**"Danger Zone"**

**Written by David Ellis**

**Edited by Jason McDonald**

**Chief Editor: Michael Shirley**

**

* * *

**

**The Negative Zone, The Year 2099**

"Oldskool to _Cormorant_: come in," the *Heracles Mark IV transport's latest 'guest' announced over his communications link. "The clones've been captured -- repeat: the Fantastic Four clones are now in custody. Requesting rendezvous."

Reed Richards groggily watched as the tall black man -- apparently a Stark-Fujikawa bounty hunter -- waited for a response from his ship. While he and his teammates had just been incapacitated by stun blasts (with the exception of Ben Grimm, whose armored body required a more lethal approach), Reed's eyes and mind were lucid enough to study the newcomer. He noticed that the man's arms weren't simply encased in a metallic alloy; rather, they were cybernetic prostheses. One arm had opened to reveal an energy cannon, while the other was equipped with stun ordnance, his communication device, and other technology Reed was too addled to identify.

The Fantastic Four's leader also gazed at Ben's motionless body at Oldskool's feet. Multiple energy blasts from the soldier's cannon arm had cratered it, and Reed could vaguely see hints of charred tissue beneath.

Then his eyes locked with Ben's alert, blue ones. Not only was his friend alive, but upset. Reed watched his determined friend haul his massive bulk up to a crouching position to face Oldskool, whose back was still turned to them.

"Come in, _Cormorant_," Oldskool instructed, out of patience. "You copy? There'd better be some Zone interference causin' all this, or there's gonna be some--"

"Trouble? There already _is_," Ben interrupted as he threw a haymaker at Oldskool. The hunter turned just in time to catch the Thing's huge four-digited fist against his jaw. He reeled from the blow, but he didn't seem as affected by it as logic would dictate.

Oldskool counterattacked with his own enhanced-strength punches, but Ben pressed his assault, hammering the hunter with his fists. Ben ducked Oldskool's left hook and grabbed the man's sides under his ribcage, hefting him quickly upward. Oldskool's head and shoulders slammed against the cabin's ceiling with the force of a freight train, leaving him open to a body-check from Ben that sent him off his feet and through the open doorway into the corridor.

"Okay, I know I ain't gettin' old _that_ fast," Ben commented to Reed, pausing to chat before he stalked into the corridor to resume his fight. "I'm hittin' 'im as hard as I can, Stretcho, so how come he ain't feelin' it?"

"It ... it might have something to do with his ... his cybernetic augmentation," Reed struggled to reply, his head swimming under the influence of the stun energy. "No telling how deeply his enhancements ...."

But by then, Ben had walked out of the cabin and closed the door behind him. "I'll tell you later, then," Reed decided, before turning his attention to Sue.

As soon as Ben entered the corridor, he had to duck to avoid more of Oldskool's cannon blasts. Unfortunately, his thick frame barely fit in the entryway as it was, so Ben was an easy target anyway. Three lethal-setting blasts burned into his arms, but he kept trudging forward, refusing to let the shots break his stride. "Keep it up, hotshot," he told the hunter. "I've taken harder hits'n that from th' kids on Yancy Street!"

Oldskool found himself backed against the closed door to the storage area. He pointed his cannon arm at Ben's face. "Yancy? I was born an' raised there," he declared. "You want me t'take you there -- so I can _bury_ you?"

Ben's hand shot out and squeezed the cannon arm, pointing it at the ceiling. "Tough talk." He continued putting pressure on the arm in order to crush it like a beer can, but the robotic arm wouldn't dent. "Y'know, you got a good deal at th' body shop."

"You have no idea," Oldskool answered, detaching his arm at the shoulder and dropping low to the floor.

An instant later, the storage-area door slid open, releasing a jet of flame at Ben's eye-level. "What the--?" Ben barked in surprise, dropping the detached limb to cover his face with both hands while looking away. While his armored skin could for the most part withstand the intense heat (with the exception of the parts that were marred by energy blasts), his eyes were a different story.

"Sorry," he heard Johnny Storm apologize as the flame jet subsided. He looked back at the young man standing in the storage-area doorway in time to see Oldskool fire a stun blast at Johnny with his still-attached arm. His teammate sidestepped the energy shot as much as he could in the cramped space, but he was still tagged in the shoulder.

Oldskool rose quickly to his feet, returning his attention to Ben, who struck the hunter across the jaw with the detached cyborg arm. He staggered a couple of steps back, but he was otherwise unharmed.

"Okay, now that's just gettin' on my nerves," Ben lamented, swinging the arm at Oldskool a few more times like a baseball bat. "What's it gonna take f'r you to fall _down_?"

Oldskool blocked the next swing with his still-attached arm, but one after that connected with his jaw, and he went down like a sack of potatoes.

"A removal of his personal forcefield, it turns out," Reed answered from the doorway to the cabin. Sue was at his side, looking queasy -- they were both clutching the edges of the doorway to remain upright. "Seems our friend here ... projects an energy forcefield around himself that ... absorbs kinetic impact."

"Yeah? So how'd you get rid of it?" Ben inquired, studying the appendage he just used as a weapon.

"It was me, actually," Sue revealed. "I followed Reed's advice. He pointed out that I could manipulate invisible energy ... and the field around our guest seemed to qualify...."

Ben was perplexed. "Yeah, but I thought you couldn't mess with energy you didn't create."

Reed pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. "Have I taught you nothing...?"

"Oh, yeah ... 'energy can't be created or destroyed. Just manipulated."

Johnny stepped into the corridor, nursing a numb right arm. "That's the biggest word I've heard you use, man. You get a gold star."

"Shaddap."

"Just don't ask me to warp strange energy signatures again," Sue warned Reed with a raised eyebrow. "I'll stick to what I'm comfortable with, boosted power level or not." She smiled. "I feel like I'm going to lose what little I've eaten since we were thawed out."

"Okay, so _I_ got a question," Johnny piped up. "Well, two I guess: what did he hit us with, and why are we still alive?"

"Stun bolts ... for everybody but Grimm, there," Oldskool muttered. He was still lying on the floor, barely conscious. "Lowest setting, just t'give you a fighting chance." He gazed up at the four of them, resignation on his face. "So c'mon ... finish me off. 'S no less than I deserve."

The Fantastic Four stared at him, dumbfounded. "That's actually not how we operate," Reed replied.

Sue focused on a different aspect of Oldskool's statement. "What do you mean that's no less than you deserve?"

The hunter was silent for several long moments. "Used t'be a soldier ... f'r Stark-Fujikawa. Helped 'em clear out the Zone so they could set up shop. Killed ... a lotta lifeforms. I deserve t'die."

"Well don't expect us t'do the job," Ben told him.

"Speaking of 'jobs'," Reed spoke, his voice and mannerisms suddenly laced with inspiration, "Stark-Fujikawa sent you after us, correct."

"Yeah," Oldskool replied, sitting up. "I was s'posed to take you four in, dead or alive. Obviously, I didn't accomplish it."

Reed nodded scratching his chin in thought. "Actually, I think I'd very much appreciate it if you _did_ accomplish your mission."

"Ben, Sue, Johnny, and Oldskool all stared at him. "What?" they asked in unison.

* * *

Past and present flowed in unison in the human mindscape, allowing the interested observer quite a bit of access.

Keith McLaughlin was having fun with his boss, Dennis Kong. The operations chief for Stark Fujikawa Maintenance Flight Nine had a multitude of interesting memories. Most of them went a long way toward explaining why this man was such a petty human being, and why he delighted in bullying and antagonizing Keith. Kong had given Keith the nickname "Paranoid Keith", but from Keith's point of view it was Kong who had more to be paranoid about.

Kong's life had been happy at first. He'd been born into a wealthy family in New York, and in a true rarity his parents had never divorced. He had a brother named Andy, who was younger by a year and was very close to Dennis. Tragedy struck the family when Dennis was twelve, however -- he lost his brother to a mag-lev car accident. The Kongs were heartbroken, but they kept the loss of Andy a secret, which Dennis didn't understand until months later when he met his brother all over again.

It turned out Dennis' distraught parents sought the help of a geneticist to revive their lost son, and they shelled out a hefty sum to clone and artificially age him. The gaps in his memory were explained as amnesia from the accident, and Kong's parents were overjoyed to have this genetic copy of their son again.

But not Dennis. He knew better. He knew Andy's clone could never be his real brother, and the sight of the duplicate sickened him. So he did something about it -- he pushed the clone off a superstructure walkway into the depths of Downtown.

Outraged by the murder and overcome with shame, Dennis' parents disowned him and forced him to fend for himself. Ironically making a new life for himself in Downtown, Dennis Kong soon joined Stark-Fujikawa as a vehicle mechanic before being promoted to maintenance supervisor. He soon filled the position of operations chief for one of the company's Negative Zone outposts. He even befriended "Landshark" Wade Tyson, another Negative Zone worker trying to put his past crimes behind him.

But the recent appearance of the Fantastic Four threw such efforts into doubt. They turned out to be clones, and they brought Dennis Kong's past fears back to the surface, to the extent that he now saw clones everywhere.

Of course, that couldn't be entirely blamed on the Fantastic Four. Ever since being hit by Zone lightning and awaking from a near-coma, Paranoid Keith had evidenced the ability to delve into the minds of others and magnify their hidden fears and anxieties a hundredfold. This gift had just killed Landshark Wade -- and justifiably so, in Keith's opinion -- and driven Kong mad.

Keith watched the babbling operations chief carve up the base station's thick metallic walls with a laser drill in order to defend himself against the multitudes of imagined clones. As entertaining as it was, he had other things to do, other places to go, other people to torment. "Let's go," he told his captive co-worker Shandra Willis, leading her into the docking bay and into a docked Stark-Fujikawa flagship. He didn't have to worry about corporate officials protesting his use of the flagship; every S-F Watchdog and pilot was a bit too preoccupied screaming through detailed hallucinations to even worry about what he was doing.

Shandra, for her part, was simply shocked by the drastic change she saw in Keith -- and it was by no means limited to his appearance; he was surrounded by an aura that made him look like a negative image of himself. "Keith, what the shock has happened to you? You've never acted like this before! You're driving everyone...."

Keith stared at her with cold eyes. "Is 'crazy' ... the word you're looking for? I hope you're not ... suggesting _I'm_ crazy."

"You made Wade kill himself," she pointed out, still unsettled by the sight of Wade Tyson trembling in a fetal position and repeatedly slamming his head against the hard floor until it'd cracked like an eggshell and ended his nightmare. "What would you call that?"

"Justice ... of course."

Shandra found herself becoming increasingly disturbed by the cold tone of his voice and the odd pauses that had never been part of his speech pattern before. "Keith, listen to me: whatever that Zone lightning did to your mind--"

"It set me ... free, Shandra. It allowed me to finally ... see that my life working at this station ... wasn't the Hell I thought it was. Hell is a state of ... _mind_, after all." His dry lips parted in a smile. "So no, I'm not as crazy as you're ... implying."

"Why is it _I'm_ not back there having nightmares an' wetting myself like everybody else?"

"You can fly a flagship; I ... can't. And speaking of that, just get in the pilot's ... chair already."

"Is that all it is? I'm useful to you? Are you sure it isn't because I'm the only one that's been nice to you all this time?"

Keith gave this serious thought. "Believe that if ... you want. But the fact is, I'm just not ... done with you yet. Your mind and memories ... are open to me. Your time ... will come."

* * *

"We're not going to have much time," Oldskool explained to the Fantastic Four. "Once the HQ planetoid is in sight, we'll have to immediately drop away from this armada and make a break for it." The _Heracles_ was being towed by tractor beam by the _Cormorant_, and both ships were surrounded by a swarm of Stark-Fujikawa warships that had been part of an official blockade less than a minute ago. They were being escorted to the Octagon, the mile-long maximum-security prison where the Fantastic Four were expected to become prisoners and test subjects.

Oldskool smiled as he manned the bridge of the _Heracles_, standing among his 'captives'. He'd just ended a transmission with Evan Krieger, Stark-Fujikawa's Negative Zone division head, and he was confident that Reed Richards' clever ruse was going to work.

The Fantastic Four weren't smiling. "This is gonna blow up in our faces, isn't it?" Johnny whispered as he fidgeted. Their wrists were bound by energy cuffs, and Johnny in particular was finding it difficult to stand still.

"It's not if you keep y'r mouth shut," Ben warned in a similar whisper. "Big Brain's plan got us this far past th' blockade. We choke now, we're as good as toe-tagged."

Sue studied Johnny with undisguised concern. "Speaking of choking," she whispered to her brother. "How're you feeling? You inhaled some of the Zone's poisoned atmosphere hours ago, but I haven't heard you cough in a while."

Johnny chuckled, a cocky smile lighting up his face. "You just now noticed that? And people say _I_ don't pay attention."

"Johnny's respiratory system is incredibly advanced," Reed explained. "He surrounds himself with plasma flame and hydrogen atoms, which superheat the air and allow him to fly."

"Ever tried breathing superheated air, and at a thousand feet?" Johnny asked. "I haven't had a chance to flame on that much since we were 'born', but I inherited the original Johnny's lung mojo."

Ben eyed Johnny skeptically. "So, wait? You're tellin' me that Negative Zone air didn't do nothin' at all? I know I heard ya cough at least once."

"I just inhaled one or two lungfuls of the stuff, man. No biggie."

Reed pursed his lips in thought, pondering this. "Come to think of it, Johnny, your lungs' method of filtering the atmosphere into a breathable substance might be crucial in restoring the Negative Zone to its former state, once the opportunity arises."

Ben examined the scorched craters that had been burned into his chest. "Just be sure ya pencil in some time in that busy schedule of yours t'patch _me_ up, Stretcho."

Oldskool idly reattached his prosthetic arm with a sharp click, then winced and wriggled his fingers experimentally. While his limb was artificial and easily detachable, the way it simulated a real arm's sensations made him feel as if he were regaining feeling in his real arm after a brief period of numbness. He even endured the same barrage of icy tingles commonly associated with that experience. "Is the science lecture over?" he asked the Four. "Because it's almost showtime, and if you want them to think you're my captives, you gotta start acting that way."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Ben mumbled. "We know how ta play along. Just don't expect an Oscar performance from us."

The hunter shot him a quizzical glance. "Who's Oscar?"

"Aw, never mind." He fidgeted with the large circular plates that had been temporarily moored to his massive arms. The energy-cuff plates connected to each other by an energy beam similar to a tractor beam, preventing captives from using their powers or moving their arms too much. His cuffs were larger than the others', with greater energy output to compensate for his bulk and strength limit. "You c'n turn these things off when the time comes, right? 'Cause if this is a double-cross an' we're trapped in these things forever--"

"Then I'd hate to be you," Oldskool replied, not intimidated by Ben in the slightest. "I'll hold up my end of the deal. I'm only goin' against my own employers 'cause what they're doing to this Zone ain't right. I was a party to that once upon a time ... and the stuff I did, the nightmares I had as a result ... it ain't worth it."

Undisguised concern on her face, Sue studied his face. "You believe we can rectify this situation."

"You're the Fantastic Four," he answered matter-of-factly.

"We're clones," Reed reminded him, a faintly sullen tone to his voice.

The bounty hunter turned to face the troubled leader. "Yeah, you're clones, but you're _provin'_ you're close enough to the real thing for me. If anybody can get their attention about what they've done to this place, it's you."

Reed cocked his head to the side as he regarded their new ally. "No offense, but what would you know about us in the first place, aside from the intel your employers have given you?"

Oldskool smiled and glanced at Ben. "Like I said, I'm Yancy Street born' an raised, just like him. I've heard stories about you guys all my life. I couldn't let Stark-Fuji know that, but still. You're legends. Don't forget that."

"Cormorant_to Stark-Fujikawa Squadron A,"_ they heard the smaller ship's pilot broadcast to the warships. _"I've been monitoring activity inside the _Heracles_, and it sounds like Oldskool is going to mutiny with the Fantastic Four."_

All five inhabitants of the heavy transport looked at each other with eyes as wide as saucers. "Shock!" Johnny and Oldskool exclaimed in unison.

"_They're about to make a break for the HQ_," the pilot's nasal voice went on, "_so get ready to take them down_."

By the time the pilot had finished his second sentence, Oldskool had disengaged the Four's energy cuffs, and the transport's cabin was ablaze with frantic activity. Ben climbed into the pilot's seat, almost breaking it in the process, the others strapped themselves into available seats, manned the appropriate stations, and generally hung on for dear life.

Sue conjured a cocoon of invisible force around the _Heracles_, cutting it off from the _Cormorant_'s tractor beam generator. Ben dipped the transport a hard left, dropping it out of formation like the galaxy's clunkiest fighter jet. Johnny created a wall of flame around the ship that spread out and enveloped the opposing warships. Reed stretched and expanded his malleable body to cover most of the cabin to act as extra insulation against ship-rattling attacks. And Oldskool not only cursed the _Cormorant_'s pilot for selling them out, but he also cursed the pilot's children, parents, grandparents, and in-laws for good measure.

The transport swooped in the direction of the Stark-Fujikawa headquarters with a grace that was almost impossible for its bulk. The squadron of warships followed, pelting Sue's forcefield with a seemingly-endless supply of missiles.

"Okay, I'm pretty sure this headache's never going to go away at this rate," Sue commented through gritted teeth as she felt every single explosion through her empathic link to her forcefield.

"Just keep your forcefield strong," Reed urged as his body protected the inside of the cabin. "You can do it -- I have faith in you."

"That's sweet ... really ... but the field's about to give out. Then it'll be ... _aargh!_" Sue winced and held her head in her hands as a sharp blade of pain lanced through her senses, causing her forcefield to dissipate in a flash of unseen energy.

"Susan!" Reed shouted, while his teammates and ally voiced their concern as well. Every impulse in his body urged him to wrap himself around her and protect her from any further harm, but he had no choice but to remain in position. He willed his body to strengthen its cushioning ability as missiles began to strike the transport's hide unabated.

"It's up t'you now, Stretcho," Ben shouted as he steered the transport in a descent toward the heavily-guarded planetoid headquarters. "Johnny, Oldie: see if Suzie's okay!"

"I'm alive," Sue mumbled, and Reed could see her nose bleeding. Whatever she said next was drowned out by further quakes from the missiles against the outside. Reed's body absorbed a lot of the impact -- enough to keep the cabin from caving in like an empty can -- but it was still a wonder that they'd survived this long.

As soon as that thought raced through his mind, a particularly nasty explosion caused the entire transport to split apart, and in short order Reed was the only thing that surrounded his friends to protect him from the Negative Zone. He contracted around them and made his body even more solid and airtight than before. As sheer momentum carried him and his cargo toward the headquarters, Reed was continually hammered by missiles ... but he no longer felt them.

While he was a clone of the original Reed Richards, he lacked the original's memories. As such, he had no way of knowing how much of his implanted knowledge he shared with the original, but he was certainly forming a hypothesis about his power that _hadn't_ been implanted. The concept of 'unstable molecules' worked on the principle of molecular bonding; the unique way the molecules were bonded together allowed the matter in question to be highly durable and adaptable. Unstable molecular fabric could stretch, contract, and resist damage to a degree most normal materials could not; Reed suspected the same was true of his own body. Reed had no way of knowing if his predecessor had figured this out, but he had to wonder if the true nature of his superhuman power was to influence his body's molecular bonding method from stable to unstable. Maybe he had, and he'd decided 'Mr. Fantastic' was a more acceptable codename than 'Mr. Unstable'.

Such a bizarre revelation had come to him while he was in a state of near-unconsciousness, but frantic shouting from inside his sphere woke him up. His passengers were becoming nervous about the fact that none of them could see where they were going.

"I supposed I could take a peek outside," Reed volunteered, inhaling a quick lungful of air for the task.

"No need," Sue whispered as she caused Reed's entire body to flicker in and out of visibility. She couldn't keep it up for more than a few seconds, but it was enough for them to see that they were moments away from splatting against the craggy surface of the planetoid on which the corporate headquarters stood.

"This is gonna get messy," Johnny observed, moving into a duck-and-cover position. "..." he prayed.

Instead, their trajectory toward the planetoid slowed to a halt. Reed's body was fairly well numb at this point, but he could tell his inertia was being dampened by a tractor beam device of some sort. "The good news is that we're still alive," Reed weakly informed his passengers. The bad news is that we've just delivered ourselves into Stark-Fujikawa custody."

"So we don't get to bounce?" Johnny asked, disappointed. "What kind of an amusement park ride _is_ this?"

* * *

If the Negative Zone could be considered an amusement park, Negative Zone Division Head Evan Krieger was very much a candidate for The World's Fattest Man. The brown-haired, mustachioed man weighed well over three hundred pounds, and his designer three-piece suit did little to flatter his girth.

Yet his luxurious, marble-tiled office made him look small by comparison. The over-decorated space -- which looked as if it had been made possible by a few too many payroll cutbacks -- was more than enough to fit the Fantastic Four, Oldskool, and a dozen Stark-Fujikawa Watchdogs. If this was how the Earth Corporation was doing business in the Negative Zone, the dimension was in even more trouble than the Four had guessed.

"Okay," Krieger spoke calmly once everyone had properly settled in. "I can see these Fantastic Four clones being crazy enough to kamikaze this HQ." His gaze settled on Oldskool. "But you? What made you decide to turn traitor?"

"I should point out," Reed interjected, "that a 'kamikaze' attempt on your headquarters was actually not our inten--"

"Am I talking to you?" Krieger asked Richards without looking away from Oldskool.

Oldskool scowled at Krieger, the Watchdogs wearing Situation Emergency GEar, and especially the desk-mounted holo-image of Stark-Fujikawa CEO Hikaru. "What made me decide to throw in with them? They wanna _fix_ this place. You wanna _end_ it. Sir."

Krieger openly chuckled. "'End it'? All we're doing is mining this dimension, just like we mine Earth resources."

It was Oldskool's turn to chuckle. "That's my point. You and the megacorps've sucked all the Earth resources dry." He turned to Hikaru. "Scary part is, if any of you'd actually stop to realize how many creatures you've killed just to get to the resources, you prob'ly wouldn't even _care_."

_"Business is business, Mr. Waylon,"_ Hikaru replied, school his face into nonchalance to keep from scowling with anger. _"You are just as guilty of the killing as any of us."_

"Never said I wasn't," the bounty hunter shot back. "But I've regretted it every single day since then. Now I wanna put it right, an' you're tellin' me _I'm_ wrong?"

_"You are allying yourself with four fugitives, Mr. Waylon,"_ Hikaru barked, his facade of calm fading. _"Fugitives who are trying to undo all the progress we've made here. That is unacceptable."_

"Besides," Krieger reminded Oldskool. "It's not like you can bring back all those creatures you killed."

Oldskool dropped his hands to his sides, lowering his head as shame washed over him like an ocean wave over jagged rocks. "You're right. I can't bring 'em back. D'you know I kept _count_ of the deaths I caused in this Zone? There's no way t'keep track of 'em all, but the ones I caused directly as a soldier? Six hundred twenty-five lifeforms. Men, women, an' children, or at least what passes for 'em here." He looked up accusingly at the corporate officials. "That was _before_ I was tasked with unleashin' the object."

Turning to the Fantastic Four, he explained, "It was a small piece of plastic, 'bout the size of a ball bearing. It was made of positive matter from Earth, and contained in a force field. I delivered the object behind enemy lines, got outta there, and let Stark-Fuji turn off the field."

Reed's jaw slacked as the implication set in. "The result was a matter/anti-matter reaction," he hypothesized. "An instant meltdown that I imagine was carefully controlled, so that there would still _be_ a Negative Zone afterward."

Oldskool nodded. "Stabilized a lotta the Zone's crazy physics as well, so they could mine it better." Much quieter, he added sadly, "if there're any survivin' natives anymore, I'd be real surprised."

"It's not your fault, man," Ben assured him. "You were just followin' orders. Our gripe is with the pieces o' crap that _gave_ the orders." With that, he and the rest of his team glowered at Hikaru and Krieger.

_"How sad for you,"_ Hikaru replied, _"as we have no further use for you, save for genetic material." He nodded at the Watchdogs, who powered up their SIEGE armor. "It appears we are right back to where we were --"_

_"Maintenance Flight Nine base calling HQ,"_ a panicked voice broke into the comm device on Krieger's desk. The sheer amount of static in the transmission made the speaker's identity impossible to determine until he shouted, _"come in! This is Dennis Kong from Flight Nine. Come _in_, dammit! We're under attack by clones!"_

The Fantastic Four looked at each other questioningly as Kong succumbed to what sounded like a coughing fit. _"Clones're ... _cough_ ... everywhere! Invading the base... the outer walls've been breached...."_ Another coughing fit ensued. _"Chokin' here ... send help ... Keith ...."_ Whatever else he said was garbled beyond recognition before the transmission broke up completely.

Krieger kept trying to revive the signal and keep in contact. "Kong ... Kong? Can you hear me? It's Evan Krieger. Hello?" No response, not even static. "_Shock!_"

_"Notify the warship fleet of this development,"_ Hikaru ordered Krieger.

"On it," Krieger answered as he tried to raise the fleet admiral on the system. As soon as his finger pressed the button, however, a transmission from Admiral Musashi broke in, just as garbled as Kong's and twice as panicked:

_"Admiral Musashi to Head--_sqrrk_--ers. One lone ship headed-- _kzzt_ --us. Looked like a Stark-- _kzzt_ --kawa flagship. _sqrrk_ Two occupants. We hailed them, but-- _kzzzzt_ Now my men are freaking out and seeing ghosts every-- _skzzzz_ I'm even seeing my own son, and he's been dead for ... oh my god! This isn't--"_

"Musashi!" Krieger shouted. "What's going on?"

_"My first officer activ--_kzzt_ Self Destruct on these ships. He's gone crazy, and now he's going to kill _sqrrk_ all."_

Krieger couldn't believe this was happening. "What are you waiting for? Override!"

_"Trying that now, but it doesn't seem to-- _skzzzzz_ Oh no ... oh shock ... it's Danny. My son is coming this way, and he says I betrayed him and--"_ Distortion erupted along the commlink, terminating that communication as well.

Krieger had punched up the warships' location within the Negative Zone onto a viewscreen ... and from the looks of things, chaos reigned. Most of the ships were firing on each other with massive energy beams, laying each other open like a feeding frenzy in a shark tank. In moments, half of the warships were destroyed, and the others were badly damaged.

Reed noticed one lone vessel traveling away from the fray in the direction of the Octagon. Calling the others' attention to it, he asked, "I assume the ship headed in the direction of the maximum-security prison is the flagship in question; am I correct?"

Krieger isolated the ship's image, then enlarged it to fit the screen. "Yeah, you're right -- it's the flagship from the Nine base. But it doesn't look like there're any Watchdogs aboard, just two humans. At least I think one's a human; he's sporting an insane energy output."

Hikaru, on the other hand, focused on a different aspect of Reed's observation. _"Just how did you know that installation is a prison?"_

"Does it matter?" Sue interjected. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but those two people aboard just took out your blockade fleet--"

_"Which had been weakened by your suicide mission,"_ Hikaru pointed out. _"If you hadn't broken formation and flown here, most of the ships wouldn't have had to chase you down and leave the blockade under-protected."_

"Are we _done_ bitching at each other?" Johnny asked. "'Cause that ship's getting closer to that prison and, well ... that can't be good. So can we take care of this?"

Hikaru's answer was predictable. _"Stark-Fujikawa will handle this."_

"Just got a positive I.D. on the people in the flagship," Krieger announced. "Shandra Willis is in the pilot seat, and Keith McLaughlin is the one generating the energy. They're from the Flight Nine crew."

Dread fell upon the Fantastic Four as they looked at each other. "Paranoid Keith's awake?" Sue asked.

"Remember, he was caught in the same voltstorm that energized our powers in stasis," Reed pointed out, fitting the pieces together. "I hypothesize that he was endowed with cosmic power perhaps similar to ours. Note the reactions of Kong and the blockade fleet: they were seeing improbable phenomena, likely mass hallucinations." To Krieger, he continued, "if you scan Keith's particular energy output, I would wager it's psionic in nature."

Johnny put his own spin on it. "That's his power? Paranoid Keith can make _other_ people paranoid? That's classic."

"Why is Shandra with him?" Sue wondered.

Ben cleared his throat. "If we're done with the yackin', can we go kick his butt, already?"

"I'm raising the Octagon's security," Krieger declared as he opened the commlink. "I'm notifying them of all this so they can be--"

"Of no help whatsoever," Oldskool interrupted. "I've seen the Octagon's security. This Keith guy'll cut through 'em like a knife through water, 'cause they don't have a ready psi-defense."

"And you do?" Krieger shot back, indignant.

The hunter-warrior tapped the back of his head. "Had it implanted. Comes in handy in my line of work." An LED light on his robotic left arm flashed green, accompanied by a loud _ping_.

"What was that?" Krieger and Reed asked in unison.

"My teleporter. It's done rechargin'. I used it to fold into the _Heracles_, an' now I can use it again. I can get on that flagship an' deal with Mr. Paranoid, but I'll need a posse for backup."

_"Then take a SIEGE team,"_ Hikaru ordered.

"Actually, I had a different team in mind," Oldskool replied with a grin as he activated the teleportation device in his arm. "Lockin' onto Reed Richards, Susan Storm, John Storm, an' Benjamin Grimm." He and the indicated team began to glow bright green.

_"This is unacceptable!"_ Hikaru shouted as the SIEGE Watchdogs closed in on Oldskool and the Fantastic Four. _"Stop them before they get away! They do not have authorization to--"_

_**ZWARP**_

Hikaru clenched his teeth, cursing in Japanese.

* * *

"Do you really have to use that ... kind of language, Shandra?" Paranoid Keith asked, clearly out of patience. The Octagon prison was in sight, and the Stark-Fujikawa flagship was making decent time getting there. The problem was that the the ship's impromptu pilot, for some reason, insisted on arguing with him every step of the way.

"I'm serious, Keith," Shandra went on. "It's bad enough you attacked everyone on the base, and then everyone in the blockade fleet. Now you wanna go lookin' for trouble in a shockin' *prison*? They haven't _done_ anything to you, Keith. Kong an' Landshark, maybe. But--"

"It isn't about what ... they've done to me," Keith replied, flashing a cruel smile made all the more horrific by the taint of the negative aura surrounding him. "It's about what they've done to ... themselves."

Shandra's eyes narrowed as she studied him. "You feed off of them, don't you? Their emotions, or fears, or whatever."

Keith canted his head to the side, pondering this. An electromagnetic warping noise sounded behind them, but he paid little heed to it. "I suppose you ... may be onto something. I can feel myself getting ... stronger with each mind I come in ... contact with. Yes. I feed on them. The more ... fascinating the mind, the ... more I take from it. So yes ... I think I _do_ feed ... on them."

Shandra's face steadily paled as she listened to this. "You're sick. I mean, you're--"

"Shandra, what have I told ... you about calling me crazy, hmm? Obviously you haven't figured it out by ... now. I ... am a god."

"You're God?" a voice behind them inquired, obviously amused by the idea. "Funny, but I thought you'd be taller, and with more facial hair."

Keith and Shandra turned around as soon as they heard the voice, and they found themselves confronted by five semi-humans. Keith already knew who four of them were, thanks to the memories of Shandra and everyone else at the Flight Nine base. They were the Fantastic Four, and the blond-haired young man who'd just spoken was Johnny Storm.

The fifth one, the mean-looking cyborg, was unfamiliar to him, and his mind was maddenly unaccessible. Keith would _not_ tolerate that.

Luckily the minds of the so-called Fantastic Four were open books.

Ben Grimm cracked his knuckles. "All right," he growled to Shandra, "are you two in cahoots? 'Cause if so...."

"I'm not!" Shandra insisted. "He brought me along so I could pilot this ship! He's holdin' me hostage -- you gotta stop 'im! Don't let 'im get in your h--" Her words were cut off by Paranoid Keith, who slapped her across the cheek so hard the cabin rang with the impact.

"Oh, that freakin' _tears_ it," Ben exclaimed, wrenching a nearby seat from its moorings and hurling it at Keith. The smaller man quickly sidestepped the thrown object, but the mountainous member of the Fantastic Four picked him up and threw him into a power coupling, exposing Keith to an intense surge of electricity.

And Ben was just getting started. "What d'ya think of that, y'little runt? Huh?" he continued as he picked up Keith and started punching him in the face. "Looks like you picked ... the wrong ... damn ... time t'cause trouble!" With each punch, Keith's face was further misshapen, with the skull underneath caving in under the impact. Blood splattered everywhere.

And Ben kept punching. At least twenty blows later, he finally noticed the glistening blood covering his fist and pretty much everything else. He had blood on his hands. Turning to Shandra and his teammates, he saw only revulsion and shock.

The horrified look in Sue's blue eyes hammered him the hardest of all. _You're a monster_, the gaze seemed to convey.

Ben glanced down and realized the body he had brutally pulverized wasn't Keith's ... but _Oldskool_'s. "What in the name of...."

Paranoid Keith, it turned out, was still right where he was when the Four and Oldskool had first arrived. "Thank you. I wish it ... hadn't come to that, though. His mind was closed to ... me, but I'm sure it held all ... kinds of fascinating mysteries." He smiled, making a disturbed rasping sound that could have been a chuckle. "But now it's just ... us."

Ben sank to his knees, staring at the blood. Sue's horrified gaze replayed in his mind, becoming more haunting every time. "I'm ... Suzie, I'm sorry..." he whispered.

"You _monster_!" Sue shouted, propelling Keith backward into a control panel and squashing him against it with her forcefield. Off to the side, she noticed Ben flinching like a child being whipped, and she instantly regretted her choice of words -- Ben seemed to think she was talking to him.

"Sue, calm down," Reed ordered her, placing a hand on her shoulder. "You too, Johnny. Our emotions fuel him, so we're playing right into his hands."

Johnny's flame aura ignited brighter as Johnny voiced his own anger. "Don't you care that this piece of crap just tricked Ben into killing a guy? How the hell do you expect us to be as emotionless as you?" The heat emanating from her brother caused them all to shrink back.

"I'm not emotionless, Johnny!" Reed shot back. "I'm just trying to stay in control, because he's turning us against each other! It's simple logic; try using it sometime."

If Johnny's aura was hot before, his temperature easily doubled in the next instant. "Why you son of a--"

"He's ... he's right," Sue gasped, trying to focus in the face of her brother's unbearable heat output. "We have to be stronger than this!"

"It's ... all about strength for ... you, isn't it?" Keith asked. "You won't admit it, but you're always trying ... to be the strong one. The previous Sue was ... orphaned, wasn't she? She had to raise an irresponsible ... brother all by herself. She wanted to ... be more mature than she was ... so the much older Reed Richards would notice ... her. And in the Fantastic Four, she eventually ... became its most powerful ... member. Eventually, but ... not immediately."

"Shut up," Sue ordered him, pressing the forcefield against him. Johnny and Reed were still arguing in the background, but she scarcely noticed.

"She started out as the ... weakest member, and you know this. She was ... useless, just someone who ... needed to be rescued. You don't want to ... be her, do you? You want all of her ... strengths, but none of her ... weaknesses, which is why you were so ready to ... accept that you're a clone."

"Shut. Up."

"No, I believe I'm ... onto something. You're a clone ... and you see that as a way to start over, don't ... you? Out of the four ... of you, you're the most relieved that you're ... not the real--"

_"Shut up!"_ she shouted, willing her forcefield into a shockwave capable of squashing him like a bug. Or at least that was the plan; nothing actually happened. "...what?"

Keith's horrific chuckle turned into an uproarious laugh as her forcefield melted off of him. "You ... _have_ no strength! It's all an ... illusion!"

With shaky hands, Sue began forming spheres of invisible energy in her hands, but she was unable to sustain anything larger than a baseball.

Reed and Johnny had stopped arguing, realizing that Sue was drawing into herself. "Sue, you have to pull yourself together," Reed advised, reaching out to her.

"Get away from me!" Sue screamed, hammering them with a solid wave of force. Johnny and Reed slammed against the bulkheads; the former's flame aura sputtered out, and latter lost cohesion and splattered against it.

"I stand ... corrected," Paranoid Keith remarked. "You do ... have strength left ... in you. By the way ... have you told Reed -- this clone of Reed who loves ... you so much -- that you have no ... intention of being with him?"

Reed couldn't believe what he was hearing. Gaping at both Sue and Paranoid Keith, he asked, "Sue ... he can't be serious...."

A remorseful Sue didn't meet his gaze. "No, he's...."

"You mean he's _right_? He's right that you don't...?"

"I wanted to tell you...."

"But she ... didn't," Keith explained, "because she is weak and ... afraid. She doesn't want you ... because the original Sue ... did. She believes a ... relationship with you would ... be a step backward ... not forward."

Reed slowly rose, trying to muster the strength to haul himself to his feet and hurt Keith. Hurt him badly for what he was revealing. But the unsettling part was that the psion was being *honest*.

He glanced over to Johnny, who was curled up in a corner in a fetal position, mumbling, "... burned you all...." Reed didn't have to be well-versed in psychology to realize that Keith had exposed Johnny's fear of hurting others with his flame.

Paranoid Keith had efficiently taken the fight right out of them; they were at his mercy.

The column of flame was merciless, washing over everything and everyone around him. Johnny was helpless to stop it, helpless to shove the genie back in the bottle now that it had been unleashed.

Was this the cost of his power? The ability to survive something primal and destructive while the people he cared about could be burnt to a crisp. Was his nature as a thrill-seeker too dangerous? He routinely walked the razor's edge between excitement and death, all for the sake of adrenaline. All for the sake of having a "cool" power, and for the sake of his own needs.

After all, fire only cared about consumption and destruction. It only cared about spreading itself around until it burned itself out. Fire was selfish. Johnny Storm was no different, he realized. Suddenly being a clone wasn't even the most important identity crisis he was undergoing. He was sure he didn't even _have_ an identity outside of fire.

He watched the flames turn his friends, loved ones, and total strangers to ash, knowing that he alone was immune to its immediate effects. But soon there would be no further oxygen in the room, and he would be killed.

He welcomed it.

"Leave them alone, Keith," Shandra shouted at him through gritted teeth, still rubbing her face where he'd struck her. "You can do anything you want to me, but leave them alone."

"Especially ... Sue, right?" Keith replied, flashing her the kind of smile she was sure to see in her nightmares. "You would never forgive yourself if ... anything happened to ... her, right? And you would do anything ... for her."

Shandra balled up her fists.

"She and the rest ... of the Four are why you left ... Transverse City, after all. You were Smiley, a poor 'downramper', a ... founding member of the Hotwire Martyrs ... gang, but you knew you would never ... stay there. You hacked into a Stark-Fuji ... database, and you stole information about the Negative ... Zone. You knew it involved Reed Richards and the ... Fantastic Four somehow, so how could you resist? You left ... Transverse, reasoning that your departure would spare the ... other Martyrs from Stark-Fujikawa's retribution. But you went ... straight to New York, hid your Transverse dialect, joined the company, and ... even conned your way into a position in ... the Zone. You set up ... a co-worker you hated to ... take the fall for your earlier data piracy to keep ... your record clean."

Her fists unclenched helplessly as the truth was exposed.

"All for a chance to ... meet the Fantastic Four," Keith went on. "All for ... the lovely Sue, here."

Shandra couldn't meet their thunderstruck gazes. Especially not Sue's.

"Is he saying," Sue asked, "That you...?"

"You should see the ... dreams she has about you, Sue," Keith commented. "The ... fantasies."

Sue looked away, trying to process this. "I somehow knew that, I think. On some level ... I mean, I suppose it's not as big a deal in 2099 as it used to be...." She faces Shandra again, trying to meet her gaze.

Shandra tightly closed her eyes. "You hate me, don't you...? You hate me...."

"No, I don't," Sue declared, conviction evident in her voice and posture. "It seems kind of silly to hate you for that. And that would be what Keith wants, anyway. Reed is right. We're stronger than this."

"I very much beg to ... differ," Keith remarked, stepping toward her.

"You're boring me," Sue commented, turning her attention to Ben, who was still mumbling on the floor, in as close to the fetal position as his bulky frame could achieve. "Ben, listen to me ... you're not a monster. Keith is playing you -- he's turning your anxieties against you."

"Get away," he softly insisted. "'M a thing...."

"You're a _man_," Sue corrected. "Look at me ... clone or not, you're Benjamin Jacob Grimm. You're still a friend, a pilot, and a team player. For God's sake, you even saved my brother's life while you were upset with him, or have you forgotten that?"

Ben finally met her gaze.

"You may think you can't escape that rocky shell, but that's all it is -- a shell. Your eyes are human, and so is your heart, Ben. I am not looking into a monster's eyes, and I never will be."

Ben stared at Sue in silence for a moment, then nodded and slowly stood up. A new resolve burned in his blue eyes.

Keith shook his head. "And now you ... all think you're overpowering my ... control over you." His color-inverted aura intensified. "I'll have to disabuse... you of that."

"Actually, you _don't_ control us," Reed announced, walking steadily toward him.

"Oh, yes," Keith chuckled. "Mister ... Richards. Or was ... it 'Doctor'? Neither, since you're ... a--?"

"A clone?" Reed shrugged. "You're right, I _am_ a clone, a fact that has caused me quite a bit of discomfort. I'm sure you're aware of that. But it's my choice whether or not to be bothered by it."

Keith advanced toward the Fantastic Four's leader. "You can't stand ... it," he asserted, "because it makes you what you ... hoped the Four would ... never be." Standing barely an inch from Reed, he spoke two simple words: "lab rats."

Reed scowled, then nodded. "Yes, I believe that's it exactly. It's something my predecessor always feared would happen: that Sue, Johnny, and Ben would spend the rest of their lives under a microscope as scientific curiosities. It's why I ... why Richards made them superheroes and celebrities after the accident."

"An accident," Keith reminded him, "that ... Richards _caused_. And they still spent their lives ... under microscopes. They were studied constantly by ... the media, and by you."

"Again, you're right about that. Richards knew that just as well as I do. But it was unavoidable, because ultimately _someone_ would study them. At least Richards had their best interests at heart."

Once again, Keith McLaughlin cackled, entertained by the attempt at a justification. "He sent them into ... the most dangerous corners of ... the multiverse. He endangered ... them and the Earth constantly."

"Whether or not Richards was right in what he did, he was right there _with_ them. The Fantastic Four risked their lives _together_."

"You justify ... his actions because you ... want to be him."

Reed shrugged. "I don't agree with everything he did, but the man had his reasons. I can't help _wanting_ to be him because I was cloned from him and I possess data about his life. There are gaps in my knowledge, but it's human nature to want to fill in those gaps."

"How absolutely ... pathetic."

"Perhaps it is," Reed acknowledged. "In fact, it occurs to me that Richards partly kept the Fantastic Four so close to him because he was tormented by the mistake he made, and Sue, Ben, and Johnny were living reminders of that mistake. He _wanted_ to torture himself."

"The same ... way you want to ... torture yourself."

Once again, Reed shrugged, acting nonchalant. "Right. But the main reason he kept the Fantastic Four close to him ... the reason he fought with him ... the reason he made so many ethical errors for the sake of protecting them ... in fact, the reason he brought them along on the ill-fated space flight ... was simple: _they're his family_. Susan Storm was his lover. Johnny Storm was his younger brother, or as close as made no difference. And Benjamin Grimm was his dearest friend. Everyone who had ever served on the team, and anyone who had befriended them ... were all his family, and Reed looked out for them."

Still a matter of inches from Keith's face, Reed smiled. "By the way, are you aware of the old saying that the magic is lost once you know how something works? That's why I'm not affected too much by your power. I know that you have to be aware a person exists in order to establish psionic contact with him or her. I know you have to entrance your victims in order to manipulate their minds, which why we were able to let you talk for so long. And it's also clear that more a victim has experienced and stored in his or her memory, the more ammunition you have. Which means you really don't have much to work with where _we're_ concerned, McLaughlin; we're only three days old, after all."

Keith staggered backward, Reed's words hitting him as hard as any fist. "No! That shouldn't ... matter! You still have experiences ... and secrets. I can still ... control you!"

"You can," Reed admitted, "but not as much as normal humans. If you continue to torture our minds, you'll end up starving yourself."

"I can already ... feel the prison inmates in my mind," Keith pointed out. "In a few ... moments, I'll have connected ... to them all, and I ... will have all the fuel ... I need!"

"Which is why this is the part where we stop you cold," Reed announced, stretching a right hook at Keith's jaw at high speed. Sue, Ben, and Johnny also advanced, severely upset. "As the old saying goes, 'you have no power over us that we don't grant you'."

Keith reeled from the blow, struggling to keep his balance. Surprised to see all of the Fantastic Four free of his control at the same time, Keith staggered backward even further, beginning to panic. "No ... all of you ... should be traumatized!"

"This is what happens when you overreach yourself," Reed pointed out, "before you fully grasp your capabilities."

Keith squinted, straining as hard as he could to reassert control over them. But Johnny, who was having none of that, grabbed him by the collar, threatening him with a flaming fist. "Go ahead," he challenged. "Get inside my head again. You made me see an inferno; I'll make sure you see it too."

McLaughlin just stuttered.

"Ain't that just like a bully?" Ben remarked. "Only strong an' mighty until the bullied kids fight back."

"He _was_ the bullied kid," Shandra revealed. "Not just at the Nine base, but everywhere his entire life."

Keith gritted his teeth and glared at Shandra. "Shut ... up."

"No, I figure it's your turn in the shrink's seat, Keith. You were always the youngest, the smallest, and the weakest of any group you were in. You never learned to deal with it, so you just let it eat away at you. To the point that -- an' I realize this now -- I tried to make friends with you, but all you could see was pity. I wasn't tryin' to patronize you, Keith. But then as soon as you get some superpower, you end up takin' it out on everybody, even your friend."

"Shut. Up."

"You're just a miserable piece of crap, aren't you?" Shandra asked. "You can dish it out but you can't take it."

Reed studied Keith as the latter started convulsing violently. "In this case I would say he quite literally can't," he observed. "He has no problem manipulating and absorbing other peoples' negative emotions, but I don't think his body and mind were ever prepared to allow for what would happen when the most negative emotion in the room is his own."

"He's feeding on himself," Sue realized, watching as Keith's body was wracked with sobs, introverting just as much as the Fantastic Four had a minute ago.

"Exactly. That creates a feedback loop he can't get of, so he's unable to--"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Ben interrupted. "Skip th' lecture. He already did his damage." He stood mournfully over Oldskool's body, his shadow darkening the broken and bloodied corpse. "He did his damage."

* * *

It was an interesting thing for the creature to find out about itself.

The genetically-engineered beast of burden known as a Mole Man had been clawing away at the planetoid ore along with its brethren as their human handlers looked on. It was a particularly unglamorous job on a particularly ugly planetoid within view of the Octagon Prison, but the Mole Men hadn't minded. Work, eat, sleep -- that was all they did.

Then an intense wave of pure _thought_ had cascaded over them like a tidal wave. The Mole Men howled in agony as they felt their minds being attacked, while the humans seemingly lost all touch with reality. And one Mole Man -- designated #7-A -- was the first to piece together what was happening to itself.

Its memories were being unlocked. This was no small thing, as the Mole Men were unable to recall any life other than their current status as work animals. And yet #7-A began to see glimpses of a different existence. One it recognized as itself.

It recalled seeing itself in a reflective surface many times, and seeing a human form with pale skin and dark eyes each time. It recalled the taste of cereal at breakfast and the perfume of a woman's skin. It remembered the weight of a metal bludgeon in its hand-not-paw, and the rhythm of using the object to crush flesh and bone. It remembered harsh words from people other than its handlers, and it recalled the smell of air that was different from what it could breathe now.

And #7-A knew ... absolutely _knew_ it had a name. Conway. It tried to sound out the name, but its vocal chords distorted it to a roar. But it was an articulate roar.

The other huge, hairy claw-bearing brutes started roaring as well. Perhaps they'd remembered their former names and were trying to pronounce them as well. It didn't matter. Voice upon primal voice joined into the chorus -- first from the six on that immediate sector of the planetoid, and soon from the fifty others in the remaining sectors. And, because the Negative Zone had an atmosphere, those voices carried. Other Mole Men on other planetoids joined in the glorious wail, sounding like a cross between the blaring of an alarm siren and the grating of a rusty gate.

Whatever meaning their communal roar had started out with, by this time it had taken on a life of its own and adopted a new significance. It was the unmistakable sound of freedom.

* * *

"I can't believe what I'm hearing," Reed stated as Evan Krieger's words sank in. "You're giving us the Flight Nine base?"

_"Yes, this does not seem to be a wise decision,"_ Hikaru chimed in, disapproval drenching his words. His holographic image glared at Krieger.

"It's only fair," Krieger replied in his defense, gesturing to the Fantastic Four. "These people just saved our assets. Paranoid Keith was already tearing us a new out-port, and he was just about to start on the Octagon, which would've cost us billions more. These people are heroes, and I'd like to work something out with them."

_"Our Negative Zone operation has hemorrhaged a billion credits a day since the clones arrived here,"_ Hikaru pointed out, _"and the restoration of the Flight Nine base for their use will cost us so much more."_

Ben let out a loud whistle. "Hey! Bureaucrats! Wanna talk about us like we're in the room?"

Hikaru shifted his glare to Ben. _"You overstep your bounds, clone."_

"Actually, Ben's right," Reed spoke up. "We may be clones, but we still risked our lives and our very sanity to save that of everyone else in this dimension. We put aside our disagreement with your corporation's practices to do it. Can you put aside your tendency to view us as property in order to work _with_ us?"

Hikaru narrowed his eyes. _"Why would you be interested in working with _us_?"_

"There are bigger things at stake than money, and there are bigger things at stake than ideological disputes, Hikaru," Reed replied, holding his gaze not on the Hikaru holo's face, but on the camera mounted on the holo-emitter that allowed the Japanese businessman to monitor them from Earth. "Simply put, the Negative Zone is dying. If we don't work together to save it, cutting your company's losses in this dimension won't do you any good."

"Why not?" Hikaru and Krieger asked in unison.

"Everything is connected, gentlemen. _Everything._ The structural collapse of this dimension will cause a cascade effect across others, including our realm. _Especially_ our realm, in fact, given the ready access point to Earth that has been established. When the Negative Zone implodes -- and it will -- our dimension will be the first to join it."

"You're expecting us to try to stop the Zone's collapse?" Krieger asked. "Is that even possible?"

Reed shook his head. "No, it's not possible, and it wasn't what I am proposing. Rather, if we work together, we can slow its implosion to postpone collapse to well beyond our lifetimes. I have no doubt that we can do it." Reed's gaze addressed both Hikaru and Krieger. "It's up to you, gentlemen."

* * *

"You know, I still can't believe they didn't turn us down," Sue confided to Shandra a full week later as their ship approached the renovated facility once known as the Maintenance Flight Nine base. The interior and exterior had been completely redesigned according to Reed Richards' specifications, and while there was still so much to be done, definite progress had been made. The Fantastic Four had played an integral part in the revamp, working closely with the Stark-Fujikawa workers, especially Shandra Willis.

Now, the two women returned from a supply run with fresh materials, just in time to watch a facemasked Ben Grimm heft a giant metal insignia onto the roof of the complex. The circular insignia was of course in the shape of the '4' design on the Fantastic Four's uniforms. It seemed appropriate; the base had been renamed 'Station Four', after all.

An hour later, the Fantastic Four and the rest of the personnel gathered in the break room to celebrate the completion of the first phase of the rebuild. "I would like to thank all of you," Reed announced, "for your hard work and dedication in this endeavor. We are well ahead of schedule, surpassing every possible expectation."

Reed's speech continued another minute before his teammates and co-workers interrupted him in unison: "Okay, we get the picture! Now _shave_!" It had become a running joke among the crew, so Reed merely felt the bristly stubble on his face and smiled.

Sue and Shandra chatted by the punch bowl, enjoying the impromptu party atmosphere that was a welcome contrast to the hectic work pace this station had seen for the past week. "How do you like your new position as Operations Chief?" Sue asked, and Shandra couldn't help but blush.

"I still can't believe I have Kong's job, but I'm settling into it. I'd like to think I'm doing a better job at this than Kong did, at least."

"No argument there," Sue replied with no small amusement.

Sue put the ball back in Sue's court. "And how are you adjusting? I'm sure you're glad that there're more people to talk to now."

"Sure, if all I want to do is talk about work," Sue retorted with a smirk. "When I want to unwind and shoot the breeze, I consult the same four people. Ben, Reed, Johnny, and you."

Shandra glanced over to another corner of the room, where Johnny held court with not one but two female co-workers. "I see your brother has no trouble shooting the breeze. It's nice that he has someone else to hit on now."

"As long as he remembers not to get too far ahead of himself," Sue commented, "he'll be okay. He _is_ only ten days old, after all."

"What're the odds of Johnny pacing himself?"

Sue rolled her eyes. "Good point." She watched as, unsurprisingly, Johnny and his two new friends left the break room to explore other parts of the complex. "If their little tour of the facility doesn't end at the living quarters, I'll be very surprised."

"Why can't I have that much luck with women?" Shandra wondered, then. "That reminds me, Sue: I hear things are still strained between you and Reed."

"We still haven't had the chance to discuss the matter," Sue admitted. "Everything's been so busy...."

"Because you two keep finding excuses to bury yourselves in work and avoid each other, right?"

Sue watched Reed stand toward the center of the room, chatting with an engineer on something or other. He looked so alone that Sue's heart couldn't help but ache. "Yeah ... you're right. But how do we even talk about this? I don't think I was even conscious that I wanted some distance from Reed until Paranoid Keith brought it out." She looked back at Shandra. "I think he's been avoiding you too."

"Because he thinks I stole you away from him, or something silly like that," Shandra chuckled. "Men can be so dense."

"Especially since I'm not sure I even want to be in a relationship with someone. I mean it's tempting, but I don't think I'm ready."

"I'll keep that in mind," Shandra commented with as straight a face as she could manage, which wasn't much.

Sue raised an amused eyebrow at her friend, then glanced over to Ben, who was also sitting alone, nursing a steel container of punch as if it were the last stiff drink of the night. "And then there's Ben...."

Before she could finish her train of thought, an alarm sounded. Reed, Sue, and Ben rushed over to the main communication center, with Johnny and the rest of the crew trying to catch up.

"Stark-Fujikawa HQ to Station Four," Krieger's voice bellowed. "Repeat, Stark HQ to Station Four. We have a situation. A horde of ... creatures just invaded this place, and they're out for blood! Watchdogs are holding them off, but I'd really appreciate it if you Four showed up here before they reach my office! I just had it painted!"

"We're on our way," Reed answered. "Station Four over and out." Turning to his teammates, he commented, "I guess it _was _naive to hope we'd have a respite from crises until I could get the monitoring system online."

"Told ya," Ben remarked. "Now let's hit the bricks, already!"

Unexpectedly, the crew chimed in, "do it! Do it! Do it..."

"Do what?" Reed asked, a bit perplexed.

"You know," Shandra told him. "The hand thing."

"Might as well," Ben relented, holding out a large craggy hand. The others each piled a hand atop it: first Reed, then Johnny, then Sue. That drew a round of applause from the rest of the crew, all of whom were now diehard fans of the Fantastic Four.

With that out of the way, Reed and his friends moved to the docking bay. "Let's go. We have our work cut out for us."

**

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END

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In _**Fantastic Four 2099UGR**_** #1, Volume 2:**

**Just who ARE those creatures attacking the HQ, anyway?**


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